Lightning Bolt Earthly Delights
Rhode Island duo Lightning Bolt is one of the rare groups you don’t want to […]
Rhode Island duo Lightning Bolt is one of the rare groups you don’t want to change. Their m.o. is so potent, it would be misguided for them to deviate from it. Drummer/vocalist Brian Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson make hyper-tense, swarming noise rock that moves with exhausting speed and power while avoiding cartoonish macho posturing. A somewhat-maddening OCD quality animates Lightning Bolt’s no-wave speed-metal jams, but they somehow make that vein-bulging repetition more exciting than it has a right to be, through sheer mercurial dexterity on their instruments. Earthly Delights, their fifth album, offers yet more artful vandalism of musical decorum and acutely rendered aural apocalypses. As ever, one needs to gird one’s nervous system for the band’s whirlwind tour of textural extremities, rhythmic complexities, and skin-rippling velocities (save for the relatively sludgy “Colossus”). Earthly Delights for some, surely, and otherworldly torments for others.