Between madness and a dream: GUM’s latest album ‘Blue Gum Way’

Alternative

9 Mar

The multi-instrumentalist and member of Tame Impala’s touring band releases his seventh studio album to date on King Gizzard’s label.

★★★★☆

GUM, the solo musical project of Australian musician Jay Watson, has released Blue Gum Way, his seventh musical endeavour under the GUM moniker. It marks the first on King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s record label, p(doom) records, and follows 2024 collaboration between GUM and Gizz’s own Ambrose Kenny-Smith, Ill Times.

Blue Gum Way opens with Man Alive, a track that morphs from mellow, psychedelic nirvana into a lovably GUM-y guitar solo at its climax. Phosphene Scream is a career highlight for Watson, offering far-out indulgence a la King Gizzard’s Butterfly 3000, with vocal delivery in the style of The Magnetic Fields. It’s one of GUM’s best, undeniably, before segueing into the lo-fi, stripped-back Expanding Blue. The title feels apt; each track is an effortless expansion of the cosmos, wrapped in dreamy melodies and sections of ponderous guitar.

The psychedelic reverie rolls on in album cuts In Life and Man Ray Bay before we arrive at the latest single Celluloid, following in the psych-pop footsteps of genre-mates Gizz and The Murlocs. There’s a rich, pseudo-Eastern tinge to the melody; a pulsing rhythm that propels the track from pop cut into something really exciting. The solo that kicks in two-thirds of the way through is everything the modern-day fuzz-rock genre should be. It’s mad, nonsensical, and a whole lot of fun.

Outrider similarly blurs the line between drug-fueled robo-beat and poppy jaunt, with Beatles-esque harmonies and a little more of Harrison’s eastern flair. Closer New Equator is a deliciously glacial number that feels in dark contrast to the preceding tracklist. It builds to a hypnotic droning coda, making for a fitting parting word from the record.

Once again, GUM has shown a slick understanding of the psych-pop and space rock genres, expanding on the sound now synonymous with the Pond musician. Fans of Ill Times and Watson’s latest efforts, Out in the World and Saturnia, will once again find lots to love on Blue Gum Way, never tiring of exploring this strange, technicoloured world with him — the kind of world only GUM can conjure.

Blue Gum Way is out now via p(doom) records.