Album: Earthly Delights
Artist: Lightning Bolt
Genre: Noise Rock
Year: 2009
Label: Load
Disclaimer: For those who read my previous review of Lightning Bolt’s Wonderful Rainbow, some of this may be recap. Also, Chippendale doesn’t really sound like Zach Hill at all. I don’t know where I got that idea from.
At five albums now, you’d think Lightning Bolt would have run out of ideas. After all, how far can you really take minimalism in music before you start repeating yourself? But no. The duo is still managing to take their selected brand of Noise Rock to new places without changing their drum and bass setup. It’s fairly impressive too. For playing such abrasive music, every Lightning Bolt album has been well received, critically speaking, and they’ve got a devoted following of fringe music lovers (like me.) More than that, the music is actually really good. Hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, Lightning Bolt consists of bassist Brian Gibson and drummer Brain Chippendale and together they create Avant-Garde Noise Rock that, against the odds, manages to have everything from hooks to actual melody, even while drenched in mountains of heavy feedback.
Lightning Bolt is about as far from conventional music as Vegemite is from tasty, and it all starts with the set-up. Gibson’s unusual instrument sound is usually mistaken for a guitar but it is, in fact, a bass, tuned to cello standard tuning with an extra banjo string. Along with this strange instrument is an array of effect pedals that serve the purpose of making the sound coming out of his bass everything from high-end squiggles to fuzzed-out quakes. By way of a delay pedal, Gibson also has the ability to loop his bass lines, allowing it to sound like there’s more than just one of him and play individual parts of the song at the same time. But this band is a duo and would not be complete without Brian Chippendale.
Behind the drums, Chippendale is a force of nature, an aggressive one-man demolition team that, if he wanted to, could level skyscrapers with just his drum kit. According to Chippendale, he plays in such a way where he’s trying to fill up space with his drum beats, which adds to the overloading effect of Lightning Bolt’s music He’s also, inexplicably, the band’s unsettling vocalist. Chippendale doesn’t really sing with Lightning Bolt, he more howls like he’s just been set on fire and is desperately trying to put it out. He does sing words usually, but it’s nearly impossible to decipher them under all the fuzz. Not only that, but Chippendale doesn’t use a regular microphone. He wears a mask with a built in contact mic made out of a telephone receiver, which further distorts the sound. Lightning Bolt without words is a volatile ride through an Arggo-Nosie Rock amusement park. With words, and Chippendales demented howling, you enter a bizarre variation on the amusement parks funhouse, where everything becomes even more disorienting.
The bands most recent release is this album, Earthly Delights, which continues their foray into spastic low-end rhythms and uncompromising audio assaults. It also manages to hit the benchmark set by their previous two albums, Hypermagic Mountain and Wonderful Rainbow, even surpassing them at times. There is a danger in Lightning Bolt’s music though and that’s the possibility for wankery at the wrong times. As strange and powerful as this record is, it has two weak spots. The first is “Flooded Chamber” in which the band manages to step in sonic shit and takes about four minutes trying to scrape it off. Gibson’s bass on the track is effected to the really high and almost painful end of things, while Chippendale just flails like a loon hopped up on too much PCP. It’s a track that, unlike most Lightning Bolt songs, doesn’t go anywhere and just kind of chases it’s own tail. The other weak spot is the short and pointless “Rain On Lake I’m Swimming In” which is just two minutes of Gibson aimlessly plucking the higher notes on his bass while Chippendale makes nonsense sounds into his mic. Both of these tracks could easily have been left off the album and it still would have been solid, probably even more so.
But aside from those two hiccups, the rest of the album is hot white gold. The opening cut and this blog’s namesake “Sound Guardians” starts out with Chippendale’s pounding drums and warping waa sounds from Gibson’s bass before kicking into one of the most raging Lightning Bolt songs to date, and certainly the most bombastic they’ve sounded right out the gate (oh look, a rhyme.) The schizophrenic fury doesn’t quit and even picks up further with the second track, “Nation Of Boar” which is a quintessential Lightning Bolt song if I ever heard one, with roaring low-end bass chords over Chippendale’s frenzied drum lunacy and manic vocalizations.
However, possibly my favorite track on the album is the seven minute long thunderer “Colossus” which is one of Lightning Bolt’s less spastic and more epic compositions. It’s slower than “Nation Of Boar” or “Sound Guardians” but that makes it feel more powerful somehow. It’s well titled too, seeing as how it conveys the feeling of the colossus rising up from it’s slumber and then lumbering it’s way across the land. As the track progresses, Gibson’s bass work gets more and more wild and Chippendales drums more rowdy before coming to a place of almost calm at the track’s end. It’s got a good arc. Throughout the album, the band doesn’t let up it’s uncompromising sound but occasionally does dip into what could actually be considered a hook or groove. Come to that, Lightning Bolt is actually very groovy music, it just might not seem like it at first.
A lot of people may think that Lightning Bolt is just random noise blather, but I have to disagree. Brian and Brian are obviously skilled composers as well as musicians and they’ve proven that by delivering yet another excellent adventure into Noise Rock madness. It’s got hooks, its got grooves, it’s got walls of distortion and it’s chock full of electrified energy. Really, what more could you want?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment