Changes

"Changes" reminds me a lot of "Sketches of Brunswick East." It's much softer than the heavy, psychedelic rock that King Gizzard has come to be known for. The album tones back the guitar work in favor of more keyboard sounds, which gives the whole album a jazzier feel to it. Like "Sketches," this record also focuses around a single melodic motif, which keeps coming back in different ways. The first track is quite the journey, and definitely the highlight of the whole experience, and it does a good job of setting the tone for the album, as well as introducing the chord progression the band continues to return to throughout the experience.

This album has more of a pop flavor than any previous work from King Gizzard, for better and worse. "Butterfly 3000" had a notably poppy feel to it, but it stands out through the unique rhythms and polymeters. "Changes" is much more straightforward, which makes it more accessible, but it also makes it sound less like a King Gizzard album. Pop music is impressive in the sense that it does so much with so little, but sometimes I find it to be boring, predictable, and algorithmic. For the most part on this record, the songs are shorter and with predictable structures, but the melodic motisf the album is structured around are weird enough that it still feels "Gizzy" enough to stand out from the ocean of homogeneous pop music floating around these days.

The two notable exceptions to this more mainstream song structure are with "Change" and "Astroturf." "Change" gives us a little of everything, and makes for an enjoyable experience by itself separate from the rest of the album. "Astroturf" is a bit jammier, reminding me of something that could have fit on "Ice, Death...," but I didn't enjoy "Astroturf" as much as anything off that record. Nevertheless, these two songs should be enough to satisfy people expecting something more longform and unpredictable from King Gizzard.

Out of the three albums the band released in October of 2022, this is my least favorite. It feels like there was a tradeoff between mainstream appeal and experimentation here, which is a false dichotomy coming from the band that made a record like "Polygondwanaland," which was extremely weird and unique without sacrificing accessibility. That said, "Changes" is still a decent record. Maybe I've just come to expect more than "decent" from this band by this point, and maybe it's my fault for setting my expectations so high.

Oh, also, it's cute that the first letter of each song spells out "changes". It gives the record one extra detail that makes it feel more like a King Gizzard album.

My rating is 6/10. Pretty good!