
Both of these tracks could easily have been left off the album and it still would have been solid, probably even more so.īut aside from those two hiccups, the rest of the album is hot white gold. 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. It’s a track that, unlike most Lightning Bolt songs, doesn’t go anywhere and just kind of chases it’s own tail. 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. 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. As strange and powerful as this record is, it has two weak spots. There is a danger in Lightning Bolt’s music though and that’s the possibility for wankery at the wrong times. It also manages to hit the benchmark set by their previous two albums, Hypermagic Mountain and Wonderful Rainbow, even surpassing them at times. The bands most recent release is this album, Earthly Delights, which continues their foray into spastic low-end rhythms and uncompromising audio assaults. With words, and Chippendales demented howling, you enter a bizarre variation on the amusement parks funhouse, where everything becomes even more disorienting. Lightning Bolt without words is a volatile ride through an Arggo-Nosie Rock amusement park. He wears a mask with a built in contact mic made out of a telephone receiver, which further distorts the sound. Not only that, but Chippendale doesn’t use a regular microphone. He does sing words usually, but it’s nearly impossible to decipher them under all the fuzz. 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. 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. But this band is a duo and would not be complete without Brian Chippendale.īehind 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. 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. 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.

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. Lightning Bolt is about as far from conventional music as Vegemite is from tasty, and it all starts with the set-up. 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. 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. The duo is still managing to take their selected brand of Noise Rock to new places without changing their drum and bass setup. After all, how far can you really take minimalism in music before you start repeating yourself? But no. I don’t know where I got that idea from.Īt five albums now, you’d think Lightning Bolt would have run out of ideas. Also, Chippendale doesn’t really sound like Zach Hill at all.
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