King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's Chunky Shrapnel: demented wig-outs and noodle jams

King-sized psychedelic delight on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard live album Chunky Shrapnel

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King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard: Chunky Shrapnel
(Image: © KGLW)

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Chunky Shrapnel is a 96-minute feature film that captures Australia’s finest loopy psych trailblazers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard on their 2019 European tour: sweat, adrenalin glands bursting, dual drummers, extended wig-outs, noodle jams, demented time signatures, squeaky-high vocal harmonies… the works. 

As lead Gizzard Stu Mackenzie puts it: “It was fun and funny and wild and weird”. 

To complement its release there’s also a 16-track double LP – a full-on freak-out, comprised of songs spanning the collective’s fertile career (15 studio albums in eight years).

There’s the Jeff Wayne (War Of The Worlds)-esque Murder Of The Universe, live in Utrecht. There’s the Roxy Music-esque Let Me Mend The Past, live in Madrid. 

Everywhere there’s the perky Brubeck-style guitar line of The River (from 2015’s Quarters!) Overall it’s a psychedelic delight, best summed up by the tumultuous closing, 19-minute long melee A Brief History Of Planet Earth, live in London, Berlin, Utrecht And Barcelona. Well yes, of course.

Everett True
Everett True

Everett True started life as The Legend!, publishing the fanzine of that name and contributing to NME. Subsequently he wrote for some years for Melody Maker, for whom he wrote seminal pieces about Nirvana and others. He was the co-founder with photographer Steve Gullick of Careless Talk Costs Lives, a deliberately short-lived publication designed to be the antidote to the established UK music magazines.