Scizzorman’s HOW TO GET YOUR LIFE RIGHT WITH WHAT’S LEFT is the kind of album that seems to have arrived from somewhere just outside the boundaries of conventional rock music. Across seven tracks and a little over 30 minutes, the Australian alternative funk-rock and psychedelic outfit build a strange, colorful and frequently unpredictable world from glam, stoner rock, swamp blues, retro funk and psychedelic experimentation. The title itself suggests an existential crisis delivered with a sense of humor, and that balance defines much of the record. These are songs concerned with a world that can feel increasingly dystopian and absurd, yet Scizzorman respond not with solemnity but with imagination, irreverence and a willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads. The result is an album that feels deliberately difficult to categorize, but never aimlessly so. Every stylistic detour contributes to the sensation that the band is trying to make sense of a reality that no longer makes much sense itself.
“The Lesser-known (Pts 1-3)” provides an appropriately curious entrance into this world, establishing the album’s taste for unconventional structures and narrative fragments before “The Next Gen Is Broken” sharpens the record’s generational and social observations. “Narcissistic Nymphs Of The New Age” pushes the satire further, suggesting a band fascinated by the strange personalities and cultural contradictions of contemporary life. Then comes “Cavalcades,” which continues the album’s tendency to shift direction without warning, followed by “The Great Unknown,” a title that could easily serve as a description of the record itself. “Mystical Yeast” sounds like another invitation to abandon conventional logic, while “Get With The Program” provides a suitably provocative finale. The sequencing works because Scizzorman understand that unpredictability becomes enjoyable when there is confidence behind it. The songs do not simply jump between genres for novelty. They use those changes to keep the listener permanently alert.
At the heart of the musical chaos is a remarkably tight core. Drummer and vocalist Terry J Vinci provides the rhythmic engine and much of the album’s lyrical personality, delivering outrageous observations and existential commentary with a performance style that refuses to take the expected route. Cody Robson’s bass provides a smoother foundation, giving the more experimental moments something physical to lock onto, while Stewart Herbertson adds vibrant guitar and synthesizer textures that help connect the funk, glam and psychedelic elements. Their contrasting vocal parts add further character to the arrangements. The result is a band sound that can move from swampy and heavy to glossy, funky and atmospheric without losing its identity. Adrian Vinci’s mix plays a major role in making these potentially conflicting ingredients cohere, allowing the album to sound colorful and layered rather than simply crowded.
Scizzorman’s influences are obvious in the best possible sense. The rhythmic confidence of Red Hot Chili Peppers, the eccentricity of Frank Zappa, the angularity of Talking Heads, the theatrical instincts of David Bowie and the psychedelic legacy of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix can all be sensed in the album’s DNA, alongside the sharper rock sensibilities of Arctic Monkeys and The Dandy Warhols. Yet HOW TO GET YOUR LIFE RIGHT WITH WHAT’S LEFT does not feel like an exercise in imitation. It feels like an argument for musical curiosity. The band takes familiar ingredients and throws them into a deliberately unstable environment, creating something that is humorous, psychedelic, funky, heavy and occasionally surreal. After a post-pandemic hiatus and a period of writer’s block, Scizzorman have returned with a record that seems determined to compensate for lost time. Its message is perhaps hidden inside its absurdity: when the world becomes difficult to understand, there is still value in questioning it, laughing at it, dancing through it and finding your own way forward.