Lightning Bolt do not live up to the imagery evolved by their moniker. In fact, Lightning Bolt is more like the accompanying thunder than a swift discharge of energy—a bellowing rumble that ultimately seems to collapse under its own weight. With the band’s fifth album, Earthly Delights, the crash is louder than ever.
With Brian Chippendale on drums and (the closest thing to) vocals, and Brian Gibson on a very uniquely altered bass guitar (half strung as a banjo), Lightning Bolt’s sound is most appropriately described as armageddic, but there is something uncharacteristically enticing about this noise act.
From the onset of Earthly Delights, with “Sound Guardians” pulsating through a tonally washed out bass and pounding drums, a battalion march comes to mind: an image of man pitted against the deranged into barren lands of the apocalypse. But that is the last time in the next fifty minutes that you’ll ever associate anything on this album with the adjective “barren.”
The two Brians seem to be facing an empty canvas. Eventually someone begins to draw something—a vivid landscape of a beautiful field or a portrait of a happy family; but as artists they are unsatisfied and unfulfilled. They begin to fill the canvas with blotches and slashes of disagreeing colors and a montage of other designs.
The point where a song’s simple structure begins is the same point where the discordance begins to escalate. The humble bass begins, but not before an acute understanding of how to maximize an amplifier’s gain knob. The drums build and pound and build and pound, and the shouting, distorted vocals culminate into the thunder of Lightning Bolt.
The band is at its best on Earthly Delights. They’ve managed to fill space with chaos and still have an underlying, danceable noise. But their biggest accomplishment is the unrelenting onslaught of layers that on early recordings simply sounded muddled. Who knew noise could be so high-fidelity?
Voice’s Choices: “Nation of Boar,” “The Sublime Freak,” “Funny Farm”
