Lightning Bolt – Hypermagic Mountain

Load Records (2005)

Hey! Remember the 2005 project? Well, I put the kibosh on it because, well, I didn’t get my act together quickly enough and, let’s face it, nobody wants to know what your top 50 of one year is. I like to think it was endearingly quixotic. Anyway, there were some write-ups that I completed that didn’t end up on here at the time. And, seeing as I just wrote about the new Lightning Bolt album, I figured why not publish my thoughts on the record directly preceding it? So here we are. This does not mean I will suddenly stick all those completed reviews on the blog right now. That’s because I have an even more ‘endearingly quixotic’ project in the works, of which this album is most likely not a part. Can you guess what it is?! Ooh, exciting innit.

[As this is old, and part of the 2005 project, there will probably be references to that. And recent events that are now dim and distant. Please excuse these. I’m not editing them out, as I like the historical artifactitude of it all. At which number would this have been, pop-pickers? Funnily enough, it’d likely only have been one or two places above this one, the last post made while 2005 project was still alive. How weird! Anyway, here we go.]

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I want to stick this album higher than I have done, but there is a flaw preventing me from doing so. Before that, I would like to focus on the many positive attributes Lightning Bolt brought to the table in the oh-five.

For those who don’t know, Lightning Bolt are an incredibly energetic power duo from Providence, Rhode Island, and signed to Load Records, home to many energetic American power- bands. The unifying theme of the label essentially consists of DIY-sounding, angry (but in a fun, rather than angsty, way), noise-rock bands with a definite punk rock sensibility. Check it out for it is, along with Crucial Blast (Genghis Tron [they’re now on Relapse – me, in 2009], Skullflower, Geisha etc), where it’s at for modern noise rock at the moment.

Hypermagic Mountain is the fourth album from this fuzzed-out rhythm section, and it is epic. But when I say ‘rhythm section’, this is not a detail easy to infer from listening to the music, for it is intensity in Ten City. The bass is distorted almost beyond recognition, and sounds very high, almost like a normal electric guitar. This, coupled with Brian Gibson’s virtuosity on the bass – able to hit rhythm, riff and solo like he was ringing a bell – legitimately remind me of the late Cliff Burton, Metallica’s second, and pretty definitely most well-loved, bass player.

The drumming is equally fantastic. Like Gibson, skinsman Brian Chippendale plays like everything is a solo, but with such rhythmic precision and visceral impact that the listener is never left resenting such a display of technical skill. It is this combination of immense technical acuity with punk attitude and compositional skill that has led them to be described as both punk rock and prog rock, a laurel few bands can boast.

The ‘punk’ aspect is evident in the rough and ready delivery of the music, as well as their frenetic live shows and overall aggressive sound. The prog aspect, though I would not use the term to describe them, is more justifiable now than ever before. The crazy time signatures and song construction sounds like it has more in common with the improvisation of free jazz than the planned-out prog, but that depends on how the Brians write their songs. So that angle is possible, though debatable, even with the recent more towards ten-minute songs (‘Dead Cowboy’ and ‘Mohawk Windmill’ take a bow). More compelling is the nomenclature they give their music: albums called Ride the Skies and Hypermagic Mountain, as well as songs like ‘Infinity Farm’, Dracula Mountain’ and the excellently-monikered ‘Crown of Storms’ suggest a penchant for fantasy/flights of imagination in keeping with a lot of prog.

Anyway, this album is pretty brilliant. ‘Magic Mountain’ is especially notable for its almost unbearable rising motif: the bass slowly, jaggedly, crunches up the gears as though it was a particularly testy Mitsubishi GTO, while the drums punctuate each grind, as the music rises and rises. Up, and up, new gear; up and up… there is brief catharsis in rock-out, but soon the duo is back to the building, building, tightening that elastic band til you think it’s gonna snap. It goes higher and higher, with a drone now in the background, building and building, and it explodes again with a minute left in the song! But it’s still building. Then the bass-line gets stuck in a circular pattern, as though their car was stuck in mud. Now it’s upper register bass loops as the GTO struggles with all its might to get out of the mud. The bass/engine is whining in the upper register, sounding like a guitar, and the tensile strength of the tune is being taken to its very limits. And then – it stops.

Sadly there comes a point, admittedly on track nine (of twelve) where the flaw hits you: there is just too much. My idea of great punk/hardcore/Noisecore albums is that short sharp shock effect. The best Dillinger Escape Plan release is less than eight minutes long. My favourite album of 1999, the Coalesce swansong [not a swansong any more! – me again], is twenty-three minutes. The problem with a release of this type being so long is that, rather than being shocking and awesome, just becomes slightly fatiguing. Worse, you get desensitised to it. When you’ve had eight tracks of this excellence, a ten-minute song is not what the doctor ordered – unless it is a complete change of pace.

So that is the issue with what is otherwise an absolutely scintillating album. It’s a shame, because the album directly prior, Wonderful Rainbow, was shorter and didn’t get old, so you can infer how awesome this could have been. I really want to tell everyone to rush out and get this, so buy …Rainbow instead; you’ll get the idea.

Lightning Bolt – Earthly Delights


Load Records (2009)

Lighting Bolt are a tough one to review. They have always been off in a world of their own. It’s a world of sky-riding, wonderful rainbows and hyper-magic mountains. A world where cover artwork is rendered lovingly, and innocently, to brilliantly detailed effect. Seriously, their sleeve art is clearly the portfolio of someone who has the hand of a savant and the mind of a brilliant six year old. Their albums are just as vivid and innocent: two-instruments (bass and drum, though you’d never believe it, listening to them) battle and collude to confuse and edify their listeners. It’s like nothing else. Only now, in bands like That Fucking Tank, is anyone approaching their laser-like, chaotic minimalism. That’s pretty much the definition of ‘original’.

But how original can it remain, a decade on? Two musicians, playing complex rock music, can only go so far, right? Wonderful Rainbow (2003) was arguably a pinnacle for the duo; vibrant aural colours splashed all over the place, crashed like waves against psychedelic cliffs. A tag-team beatdown, blows raining down on you as the pair seemed to alchemise constant fills and virtuosity into a noise bordering on pop music. The epic Hypermagic Mountain (2005) bordered on prog: an hour spent in their world of ‘Mega Ghosts’ and ‘Infinity Farms’ bordered on too much. Songs up to ten minutes long led to the sonic equivalent of barfing after consuming too much sugar and spinning around.

Four years later, the philosophical change is clear. The simple exuberance of old has been replaced by a more fuzzed, Gang Gang Dance/Black Dice aesthetic. The vocals, in as much as they were ever present, are still here. They sound as much like a giant wasp screaming through a megaphone into a tin bucket filled with tracing paper as they ever did: akin to Zen Guerilla covering Kyuss‘ ‘Mondo Generator’. They fit the new lo-fi sound very well, even if the lazy swagger introducing ‘Colossus’ makes you think Buzz Osborne is about to sneer his way into the mix, such is its recollection of early 90s Melvins slacker-chic. ‘Flooded Chamber’ is a theoretical step in the right direction, too, as the LB bring chaos and constantly-changing sounds to the fore. Problem is, it’s a bit too random, like the finely tuned, controlled chaos that defined their earlier work has now bubbled over. It’d be exciting if it wasn’t so desensitising.

Conservative as this sounds, and as much as we like bands to push themselves as far as possible, the best material on here is actually that which sounds most like their back catalogue. ‘Funny Farm’ is a perfect case in point: straight-up punk rock pummelling, mixed with that perfect combination of addictive hooks and technical ecstasy. It’s such a frazzled blast of high energy sound-spikes that you find yourself going all Super Hans as you proclaim the crack to be rather moreish. Change works superbly on ‘Rain on the Lake I’m Swimming In’, a blissful vignette that articulates perfectly the cartoon idyll in which the pair seem to reside. ‘S.O.S.’, too, is a new side of Lightning Bolt that work really well. Where usually their heaviness and intensity are filled with fun and colour, the directness and effected shouting suggest, if not actual aggression, something in that area. It’s a thrilling change of mood.

And that’s what’s perhaps most interesting about Earthly Delights. Where most bands still front-load their records (on account of the fear that you’ll hit Shuffle as soon as something displeases, like a bedsit record company exec), the ‘Bolt seem to ease you in before really testing you. The first few songs are like a recap of where they’ve been, combined with an abstract of what they intend to do for us over the next 50 minutes. It’s only once we’re settled in that the fireworks fly. It’s a bit of a shame that only half the album is both novel and exciting (by the ridiculous standards they have set for themselves), but this is objectively one hell of a journey. If you’re new to the band, there may be no better place to begin than here.

Seeland: ‘Call the Incredible (Advisory Circle mix)’

Heroes of electro-nostalgic reassurance-core, Seeland, get fiddled with by The Advisory Circle, in an unsettlingly relaxing track. It’s rather a subtle remix, TAC stripping the backing vocals and general sonic bric-a-brac from the cyber-Richard Hawley original (the B-side of ‘Library’), and replace it with the feeling that our imagined Hawley has slipped some Rohypnol in your drink in the back room of a pub on the outskirts of Sheffield. Which is better than the vague aftertaste of Jethro Tull that the original leaves you with, admittedly.

It all gets a bit woozy, with a Boards Of Canada melody line wandering into the mix to replace the chiming futuristic cityscape synth, and you’re left feeling maybe too comfortable. ‘It’s up to you’, actual singer Tim Felton gently intones into your shell-like, as the minimalist plucked strings ebb and echo in the back of your skull. He makes it seem like the choice is yours tonight, but you’re too far gone. He’s feeling up your thigh, and you know it’s not right… but his hand is warm and strong. Damn it, Seeland, no means no!