Jay Watson and Ambrose Kenny-Smith lead parallel musical lives you wouldn't necessarily expect to intersect. At surface level, they're working at opposite ends of a spectrum: Watson skews toward chilled-out neo-psychedelia, touring with Tame Impala, playing in Pond and flying solo as GUM, while Kenny-Smith brings late '60s garage and blues rock intensity to Melbourne's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, even more in the Murlocs. It's a wonder they found the time to come together, and a welcome surprise they did. Vintage, contemporary and futuristic all at once, Ill Times is a well-constructed collage: they threw everything at the wall, and all of it stuck.
Clearly, their collaboration was kismet. Longing to lean deeper into funk, Watson spent years workshopping a gritty synth instrumental to no avail. Sent to Kenny-Smith on a whim, it effortlessly morphed into "Old Transistor Radio," a fuzzy ode to the inexplicable power of music, its energy a brattier "Old Time Rock and Roll" for '90s babies. Riding a zig-zagging synthline and crunchy hip-hop drums, Kenny-Smith waxes mystic about "high frequencies I can't describe" between some manic adlibs and screeches. With radio static and an interpolation of the stacked harmonica and sax from Eric Burdon & War's "Magic Mountain," it lives up to being on "another dimension on the static dial."
Tragically, it was the cathartic power of music that catalyzed Ill Times. With the passing of Kenny-Smith's father, blues and country musician Broderick Smith, the duo reconnected, putting together pieces of music as a means of picking up the pieces. Fittingly, Ill Times begins with a moving dedication in "Dud," its lucid cosmic country landscape penned by Smith, its sparkle maximized by Watson's wavering synths. It's achingly bittersweet hearing Kenny-Smith sing his father's lyrics of having "an open heart / I believe I was told to guard it, instead I let it break apart" in the wake of Smith's passing, and he does so with fiery passion. Kenny-Smith has a knack for tackling grief with nuance: feeling the pain, yet placing it secondary to love and gratitude for the departed. In this layered vulnerability, "Dud" hits a crushingly poignant peak as Kenny-Smith completes Smith's lyrics with "Father, bid you adieu" atop skyrocketing synths. Sonically and emotionally vast, "Dud" sits in that disoriented space between an ending and beginning, and by passing the torch, fills it with more hope than helplessness.
But Ill Times spends little time in limbo. When you're hanging by a thread, you either let go or pull yourself back up, and its title track is aggressively hellbent on pushing past the pain, in spite of that being painful itself. More self-flagellatory than a pep talk, subdued verses break into a huge Sabbath-esque chorus, Watson's propulsive drum fills and interval-leaping riff the glue (or gum?) holding it all together. The spacey "Minor Setback" paces the same path more decisively, with some "tis only a flesh wound!" type dark humour to diminish problems beyond control, levity added by rubbery bass and reversed riffs. Whenever frustrations arise, Watson balances them with vibrant production like an undercurrent of assurance amidst the anxiety.
While the edgy swagger of the title track leans close to GUM's "Airwalkin'" or even Pond's "Human Touch," it makes most sense under this project — Watson writes more impressionistically than the assertive Kenny-Smith, and its attitude would be polished with more glam than grit by Pond. It's not that Ill Times collects songs that wouldn't work elsewhere, more so that they work best when worked on together. The piano-driven "Marionette" fits perfectly within the soft rock storytelling of the Murlocs' Bittersweet Demons, but they've shifted toward heavy garage and country rock since then. As Kenny-Smith's and Watson's albums have grown more conceptual, Ill Times gives them space to wander, and often, they meet on a middle ground. Joining the myriad of Murlocs songs exploring toxic masculinity, "Powertrippn'" takes no prisoners against a "peanut brain with a sullen existence," its soaring pop production distinctive to Watson, its scathing social commentary familiar ground for Kenny-Smith — it's tough to imagine them in each other's shoes.
With fewer constraints — plus the definition of "psychedelic" more ineffable than ever — Ill Times evades genre clichés, letting the pair's eccentricities steer them across styles and decades, pinned to the present by samples and sequencers. If a name is necessary, maybe it's "Emu Rock," a wink to their Aussie roots that both follows and contradicts its "keep it simple, don't overdo it" mantra. With the whimsy of Babe Rainbow and some White Album weirdness, its rhythmic synth pulse ascends into chaos and wailing bluesy harmonica. Their take on the Impressions' "Fool For You" plays close to the original, yet brings it to bombastic heights with a snarl, Watson's huge synth chords turning retro into retrofuturist. It feels a little blasphemous saying Kenny-Smith's vocals outshine Curtis Mayfield's, but he truly does in this rendition, with a possessed, impassioned edge that ups the tortured romance.
Ill times seem to always be ill-timed, requiring some creativity to push past them — something that resonates deeply with myself and any other artist who has transformed their pain into artistic energy — and creativity is what keeps Ill Times pretty damn fun despite its darkness. While soul-meets-rock can easily slide into awkward pastiche, the synergy behind this collaboration keeps its collage of free-floating ideas tight, yet effortlessly unrestricted. Maybe opposites attract, but Watson and Kenny-Smith prove to be more yin to each other's yang than expected. Hopefully the stars will align at least one more time to bring them together for more cosmic funk.