“Tezeta”

There’s a long tradition of musicians paying homage to places they’ve never been. An entire genre was even founded on that premise: exotica, which in the 1950s and ’60s played on Americans’ simplistic perceptions of far and away corners of the globe. Those records rarely had anything to do with actual world music, of course, yet they could be fascinating in how far-fetched they sounded.

Given how Australian psych ensemble King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s new album Sketches Of Brunswick East riffs on the easy-listening music of yesteryear, it was perhaps inevitable a little exotica would creep into their act. On “Tezeta” the band looks to Ethio-jazz with a song that nobody could mistake as Ethopian. The track shares its title with a song by Ethio-jazz master Mulatu Astatke, and borrows generously from the genre’s fusion of flutes, vibraphones, and wah-wah guitars—ingredients King Gizzard mine for every ounce of kitsch. “Tezeta” is about as authentic as a Technicolor movie filmed on an old MGM sound stage, but as completely fabricated creations go, though, it’s an imaginative one.