LIGHTNING BOLT

Hypermagic mountain

CD/2LP, load

Holy maccaroni, Jesus Christ on a crutch, what a motherfucker of a record! I know some people who were ready to cut their dicks off to be able to get that record early, and right on they were, because this one here will rip your balls off as well (that is metaphorically speaking and therefore true as well for you girls and ladies out there – god bless ya’ if you’re interested in Lightning Bolt). With how many words can you describe a record that is the equivalent of being hit over the head by a frying pan over and over again only that it is pleasurable? Usually writing down “abominable noise” should suffice to make all those noise addicts run straight to their record dealers and camp there until the record arrives.

Anyway, Lightning Bolt are real and steady enough to know, their listeners can only take so much, so they’ll throw in a little pause to take some breath here and there, like the first minute of “megaghost” with its weird guitar noises. And when they finally rip into the song, the guitar uses a single string approach rather than the power riff from hell approach they had before. Fuckin’ Jeff Hannemann step aside, I betya these dudes wear off a guitar neck in a week. Literally shred it to pieces by overusage. But never miss a single note (not that the listener would really realize). It seems a little unfair to call this avant-garde hardcore, because it would associate them with a fuckin’ awful bunch of bands, when you should rather have them as sons of The Ruins and elder cousins of CombatWoundedVeteran or The Locust. In contrast to both here is a lot more experimentation going on (musically and otherwise), so you might have to subtract the mathematical precision of the ruins and the juvenile testosterone fixation of CWV or Locust, and add a hundred tons of willingness to follow every weird idea into oblivion. I can’t think of any other way they’d come up with a track such as “Magic Mountain”, which is basically a really long melody of rising notes.

Coming to think of it, there are quite a lot of riffs on this one and less sonic noise. If you’d like to call that a riff – Guitar player magazine sure wouldn’t. There is even some kind of guitar solo on “Dead Cowboy”, and more and more vocals than before. And the beginning of “Bizarro Zarro Land” will have the metal-guitar-afficionades stand in first row. Though of course, the guitars by Brian Gibson are actually a bass (hah, I hid that remark in the end of the review, to make some of you go “whoa, what does he mean a guitar?” and some more of you go “whoa, what does he mean now a bass?”) and the technical rendition is nowhere near the effects-loaded, shaped to perfection, soundmixed one of a realmetal band.

Lightning Bolt about to sell out to the masses? Anyway, I’d be willing to share a room with 150 people instead of 50 to see Lightning Bolt play live. Only make it soon! And forget your earplugs at home. If you care about your health, skip the drugs, but enjoy the loudness. Volume is healthy. It blurs everything else, wipes away the bad and makes the good cling on. Volume shows importance and power, and that’s what rock music is about, isn’t it?