Lightning Bolt - A joyful noise-rock madness

We just wanna rock we don’t want to be smart

“What the hell are these two doing?”

“It’s noise!”

“Well… they make a hell of a racket, but it’s not quite just noise.”

“Speed metal, punk, hardcore.”

“A bit of that too, but we’re still not there.”

“Let’s just say they’re weird”

“Hmm… yeah, deep down they’re a couple of big goofballs who have a blast once they get going. But saying

just that they’re weird”

“So what do they play, then?”

“Well… ultimately I’d say they play rock. Yeah, that’s it, rock!”

Lightning Bolt play rock. If you have to try to explain what they play, that's really the only way to put it. The ingredients are noise, metal, punk and hardcore, all spun together into one bubbling-over mix. The one thing all these elements have in common is rock; the duo's attitude is rock; so what they play is rock. It's a broad definition, one that more or less covers almost everything that's been labeled that way - at most with some suffix tacked on - over the past 50 years. A vast scope that narrows considerably once you read it as a spirit rather than a mode: playing as loud and as fast as possible, making a racket, having fun, physicality and bodily presence, a communal experience - music that embraces the genre by playing it in light of its own history: 2000s rock 'n' roll.

Stupid music versus intelligent music. An avant-garde sensibility is still present, but shorn of its intellectual pretensions, rediscovering exhilaration and pleasure for its own sake; music as music rather than as art: instrumental use and fun aren't a shortcoming. That's exactly what the sound of Lightning Bolt produces in the listener: headbanging impossible to hold back, bodies throwing themselves into the pogo pit, unreserved euphoria that churns out endless "Yeeeeeahhh!"s. An apparent ignorance that's really nothing more than rock stripped of its pretensions; it's about not taking yourself too seriously, having a weird attitude, playing mainly to have fun.

From punk comes the iconoclasm and independence, an indiependence born of punk spirit rather than indie-kid posturing; from hardcore comes the fury; from metal the speed and a certain taste for the trashy riff; from the avant-garde the sonic exploration and the cryptic lyrics; from noise the deafening racket. All blended together into a storm pushed to maximum power, at times finding paths akin to those of japanoiser Boredoms - especially those of their early period - Boris and Ruins (with whom they also share an unusual bass-drums combo).

For Brian Chippendale, his way of drumming is like his way of drawing – "The way I drum is the way I draw" – an inseparable and, in some respects, interchangeable approach. Paintings, comics and music are all sustained by the same attempt to cover every free space with a colour or a beat, almost a horror of silence and emptiness; a way of playing in which hands and feet are never still, tentacles in constant agitation pounding on whatever percussion happens to be within reach, a phone microphone shoved into his mouth and pushed into extreme distortion to croon bizarre nursery rhymes in an alien voice somewhere between Conet Project recordings and monsters out of childhood nightmares.

Brian Gibson wields a bass set up with unconventional tunings, distortion in abundance and endless effects pedals – his Wikipedia page even claims the instrument is tuned like a cello with a banjo string substituted for one of the regular ones… who knows if it's true – which turn his sound into, more than a mere accompaniment, an actual lead engine, so much so that he's often mistaken for a guitarist. A technique capable of moving from fairly simple elements all the way to more elaborate tapping, worthy of peak Van Halen; a setup built from feedback, loops, effects that layer his own riffs on top of each other; a setup refined down to the smallest detail and brought close to perfection.

The sound of Lightning Bolt is built on this strange and extremely noisy amalgam, between Chippendale's hyperkinetic drumming and Gibson's load-bearing bass. A fully successful pairing, one that makes each player's individual style even more dynamic and channels the insane racket each instrument produces on its own into an even greater din. All of this achieved through an extremely limited set of means – not in a technical sense, but literally with very few instruments – which allowed the two of them to find freedom within an extremely tight space. To further underline the affinities between the ways he operates across his different art forms, Gibson has said: "LB in particular has showed me the power of an extremely limited palette".

Their preferred realm is the live show, a dimension in which the duo's music finds its most natural outlet: incendiary sets revolve around a tower of amplifiers blasting out watts with destructive force, in a wild magma that often crashes against the drums of a masked, possessed-looking Chippendale, with Gibson at his side, sly and composed. Even before getting into their albums, it's worth saying this: Bolt's live shows are among the best the genre has to offer, as the documentary "The power of salad & milkshakes" perfectly testifies.

Covering every little space

1994. Brian Chippendale, a student at the Rhode Island Art Institute with a passion for drums and the intention to play, hears about a kid who's a wizard on bass. That kid's name: Brian Gibson. The two start making music together and put together a band that begins playing at college parties, garages and similar venues. Their base is Fort Thunder, an artists' and musicians' workshop/living space set up by Chippendale with Mat Brinkman, the hub of choice for the Providence community and the gravitational center of creativity in the area.

After their first live show, the lineup expands by one member: Hisham Baroocha, another art institute student, joins on guitar and vocals. The early years are spent playing shows with no studio work, an aspect the band doesn't particularly favor. In 1996 Baroocha decides to leave Lightning Bolt and within a year forms another group with musicians also met at the Rhode Island Institute, Black Dice, with whom he'll help shape the sonic landscape of the turn of the millennium. Chippendale and Gibson remain as a two-piece, drums-and-vocals plus bass. All that remains of the trio lineup is a single track on the compilation "Repopulation Program".

In 1997 Providence's own Load Records decides to sign them. That same year they go into the studio to work on and release their first, self-titled record, also known as "The Yellow Record". The sound is very raw, recorded in low quality; the duo's grime comes across even rougher and coarser, tipping into excessive lo-fi. What comes out of it is a confused, not particularly focused cacophony; you can already glimpse the developments to come in the short term, but the direction is often lost amid a noise they still can't fully control. That's the case with "Into The Valley", where the interplay between the instruments is already well blended but gets lost more in racket than in the organized chaos that will later make their fortune; or with "Murk Hike", which opens with a bassline waiting to explode but just stalls on itself for its entire length. The best track of the bunch is "Fleeing The Valley Of Whirling Knives", already built on hyperkinetic speeds, alien voices and progressive chord runs. The CD reissue contains two extra tracks, recovered from a self-produced cassette: "Zone" stands out, a 32-minute improvisation. Still an immature work without a clear direction, a decent debut but nothing more. The offspring of an uncompromising do-it-yourself ethic that hadn't yet learned to coexist and hybridize with a professionalism that would later preserve its spirit and intent while also making it of much higher quality.

It takes four years for Lightning Bolt to go back into the studio. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say it takes four years for them to set foot in an actual studio for the first time; their debut was little more than a home recording made at Fort Thunder – by 2001 the base of Providence's underground movement is by then close to being seized. The duo meets a professional studio and sound engineer David Auchenbach, who becomes a constant presence and a crucial piece in defining their sound. This is how Ride The Skies (2001) comes out, again on Load. The cacophony gives way to a sonic clarity that nonetheless loses none of the sonic violence – if anything it amplifies the fury even further, managing to channel it in a precise direction. Auchenbach's contribution is fundamental in this respect. Gibson finds the perfect configuration for his bass: tuned in unorthodox ways and modified to the extreme with distortion pedals and various effects, it reaches a sonic breadth unthinkable for its instrument, often sounding like a guitar, if not an entire band all by itself. Chippendale pushes the speed of his playing to an almost inhuman level, a graceless, extremely violent drumming over which he warbles his comic-book-monster nursery rhymes. A perfect amalgam, one that manages to harmonize various elements into a single unity of purpose.

Cacophony is capable of coexisting with humour. That's the case with "Wee Ones Parade": a mocking exchange between a bass playing extremely high-pitched and the voice-drums responding by escalating the taunting, a joke that ends in an all-out brawl; or "Forcefield", which opens with a floor of screeches that sound like anything but a bass, exploding together with the drums into a terrifying noise repetitiveness. The heights of metal-riff sacredness sit alongside clownish freakouts: in "13 Monsters" Chippendale's voice croons a childlike nursery rhyme over a tapping of swirling progressions. Melody and chaos become one: "The Fairie Folk" carried by Gibson's pattering, mocked by whistling in the background, pushed all the way to overdrive. "Saint Jacques" sounds almost like a record stuck on the turntable sent into feedback; "Ride The Skies" is a melodic up-and-down at full speed. "Rotator" submerges an oblique prog undercurrent beneath a swirling current. "Into The Mist 2" is an uncontrolled few minutes of free playing in which the greatest effort seems devoted to not leaving even a moment's chance for silence to creep in. A genuine ride through the skies, breaking the sound barrier. A proposition of devastating ferocity, from the "horrendous" sounds of Gibson's bass to the wild, brutal drumming, yet one that manages to retain a freak spirit, making it at once a work of brutal and entertaining character: a merciless party.

Lightning Bolt had developed a taste for recording. Whether down to the growing following gained after the release of Ride The Skies, or to the need to tame a bull that still often threatens to throw them off, they reunite with trusty Auchenbach in 2003 to bring Wonderful Rainbow into the world. Just like its cover: a wonderful, vividly colored rainbow dissolving into disturbed frequencies; it can be read backwards too: a disturbing hiss from which a perfect iris emerges. Crackling noise merging with well-built harmonic textures; prog, noise and metal blended together at their usual murderous speeds. A more accessible and "catchy" work than the previous one (talking about catchiness in relation to their music is paradoxical, to say the least), yet at the same time even more forceful and charged in its sonics. The blind fury of the opener "Assassins" plays out entirely on these tensions, pushed right to the breaking point; an electricity charged to maximum capacity and funneled into a stream aimed straight at destroying your eardrums. But every track on the album lives off this same nature. "Dracula Mountain" is a distorted Chippendale chant wrapped in a bass playing a boogie-metal riff across odd time signatures and hiccups; "Two Towers" is made of extremely heavy hypnotic riffs and stormy drumming; "On Fire" is a monstrous cycle of spastic rhythms, nonsensical vocalizing, stops and restarts. The two of them dug even deeper into their own buffoonery here. The galloping "Crown Of Storms", alternating between tapping and extremely heavy feedback, drags you right into the heart of the storm. Not a moment's respite. The forcefulness and the sheer urge to play cover everything and leave no room to breathe. The melodic clarity of the bass on "Longstockings"; and even more so the maelstroms "30000 Monkeys" – which, true to its title, really does sound like a track played by a multitude of monkeys – and "Duel In The Deep" show the full range (achieved with very few means) of the Lightning Bolt sound: from "gentle" harmonies to a pile-up of distortion, effects and frantic rhythms that burst into atrocious feedback; the second track in particular is a genuine sonic horror, extremely heavy and charged to the limit, for once devoid of any quirkiness to offset it.

One-two punch, Ride The Skies – Wonderful Rainbow, the knockout blow delivered by Lightning Bolt. Albums that floor the accelerator all the way, pushing the sound to an unheard-of level of dynamism without ever sacrificing the sheer pleasure of listening. Pure bliss. A sonic orgy that manages to hybridize emotions and music, stunning and disorienting with its musical mixture. The two Brians have unquestionably found here the complete definition of their sound.

Dead cowboys?

Having found a way to harness and ride the electric storm, it seems there's no road left to travel. Or rather, given that stopping isn't an option, all that's left is either to stick with the tried-and-tested formula of their last two records or try to push even further. Well: our duo chooses the second option. Flashes of improvisation, longer running times and, if possible, even higher volumes. That's the intent behind Hypermagic Mountain (Load, 2005). The reins are loosened, and the fervor slowly takes over; nothing is held back anymore, everything overflows, bestial and heavy, uncontrolled and free. It's both the album's strength and its flaw: some see the long digressions as a further step forward for the duo; others find the move a bit out of their wheelhouse, to the point that the overall effect is diminished. The second reading seems the more convincing one: the longer tracks lose their conciseness as time goes by and quickly lose the listener's attention, and the heightened free-noise improvisation douses the assault's fire: as long as the music stays direct, it's lethal; when it drags on, it has far less of a grip. All in all, it seems they've started taking themselves seriously, which isn't bad in itself, but in this case it seems to cost them one of their distinctive traits along with the sheer enjoyability of their output. Listening to the anti-Bush track (Lightning Bolt writing a politically "engaged" lyric!?) "Dead Cowboy" gives exactly this impression: a devastating power that wears you down through sheer long-windedness. The same goes for the other central tracks: "Mohawkwindmill", with Chippendale pounding almost in math-rock regularity and Gibson churning out white-hot riffs; not bad, but scattered by the noise storm it creates. "Megaghost" sounds like a Black Dice track at the start, before turning into a Lightning Bolt-style storm and then again into a jam between the New Yorkers and a death metal band. Or the even more Dice-like "Infinity Farm". When Lightning Bolt do what they do best, though – songs, who would've thought, actual songs – they turn out thoroughly successful tracks. The opener "2 Morro Morro Land" is hyper-saturated: the bass carving a devastating trail behind its melodies, the drums pounded rather than played. "Captain Caveman": Chippendale croaks something you can just about make out as "This is the anthem"; and indeed it could easily be their anthem: a full-volume racket, an orgy of melody, frenzied speeds, shouting, distortion. The Lightning Bolt gospel condensed into three minutes. The same could be said of the sped-up hardcore of "Birdy". The album opens with a bang, but unfortunately the blast fizzles out afterwards.

Hypermagic Mountain is a half-successful record: there are excellent tracks that continue, perhaps even improving on, the path laid out with Ride The Skies and Wonderful Rainbow; other tracks are too long-winded and end up dulling the listening experience. On the whole, though, it's not a total miss; the engagement is still more than good, some songs get stuck in your head and you might find yourself humming them after a couple of listens, but it still suffers from the flaws already noted. There are those who praise it, hearing in it a recreation of the spirit of their live shows. At the same time, that's an impossible task: a live show is a different kind of experience from an album, and trying to capture something as physical, spontaneous and tied to its environment as a Lightning Bolt concert is a doomed endeavor from the start. If you want to experience that spirit, go to a show!

Four years of silence pass, years in which fans start to fear the project might be over. Instead, proving all the rumors wrong, their fifth album comes out in 2009: Earthly Delights. What's changed for Lightning Bolt in all this time? Apparently nothing. They keep stunning themselves and us with a violence that's still wide awake, and with the same urge to pummel their instruments at insane volumes. Anyone expecting one of their albums will get one of their albums: no more, no less. But the formula seems to have run its course: it no longer surprises, no longer thrills, no longer grips you. The energy is still huge and devastating, but the only thing it manages to do is bury everything in its path. If Hypermagic Mountain failed by letting their sound run wild in uncontrolled free-form sprawl that the two struggled to manage, this new chapter pushes even further in that direction. The tracks seem to lose almost all structure, mostly coming across as improvised assaults with the sole aim of being as cacophonous and relentless as possible: from the metal psychedelia of the opener "Sound Guardians" to the electro-rhythmic hisses of "Flooded Chamber," the extremely heavy and dark "S.O.S.," right up to the closing "Transmissionary," where Chippendale's motorik drumming at two thousand miles an hour and Gibson's bass - which for once actually sounds like a bass - get lost in a kind of amphetamine trance. Lightning Bolt are parodying themselves, settling into a stereotype of their own sound. Their main goal now is simply to make as much noise as possible and bury the audience under a pile of watts; they did that before too, but what's missing now is the sense of fun. Theirs may remain, but ours fades after just a few listens.

Still, there are moments where they recover their clownish soul; here the enjoyment returns to its highest levels: the cow-punk nursery rhyme, where Gibson at times seems to mimic a banjo, in the urban and filthy "Funny Farm"; the math-garage-speed-metal(?) of "The Sublime Freak"; the noise-delic charge of "Colossus."

An entirely transitional work, Earthly Delights delivers much of the typical Providence sound, but in the name of endlessly rehashing themselves; by the fifth outing it grows tiresome, especially when they keep returning to their less successful selves. Compared to the previous record, there is nonetheless noticeably greater cohesion; if Hypermagic Mountain was a matter of stunning you through sheer volume of notes, Earthly Delights at least has the merit of being a punch right in the face - a punch that, however, only hurts briefly, because ultimately there are fewer tracks that leave a mark.

In 2012 the band releases, in digital format, a jam captured live, I Found A Ring In My Ear. It's a loosely recorded improvisation, with a guitar working obsessively over noise-rock debris/memories and a blazing drum performance that seems to turn the whole thing into a more brutish version of Orthrelm. Tedious.

Digging through their archives, the duo then pulls out a track dating back to 1997, captured on a cassette recorder during a live performance. 20 is a raw, unfiltered portrait of their annihilating impact - twenty-plus minutes of manic drumming and blazing distortion that let us trace the origins of their journey, though ultimately it amounts to little more than a documentary curiosity.

A few months later comes Oblivion Hunter, an EP collecting seven compositions dating back to 2008 that show both the noisier/ecstatic side and the more playful side of the American duo. It's an affair, in short, of metal, skins, and tribal/psychedelic disorientation/high that manifests itself from the very first seconds of "King Candy," continuing then with the acidic pounding of "Baron Wasteland," something halfway between a less devastating version of Shit & Shine and Mi Ami.

However, the quality is still low. Indeed, while the first part seems to put things somewhat back in order, as the runtime stretches on Chippendale and Gibson end up losing their inspiration. So the galloping frenzy of "Oblivion Balloon," the pop edge (obviously very lo-fi and messy) of "Fly Fucker Fly," the admittedly charming (!) Indian-tinged scribble of "The Soft Spoken Spectre," the droning "Salamander," and above all the monotonous and needlessly stretched-out "World Wobbly Wide" do nothing but carve another wound into fans' hearts.

Three years pass, and having landed a deal with Thrill Jockey, our heroes return to the fray with Fantasy Empire. Thanks to the Chicago label's support, Chippendale and Gibson can now rely on noticeably higher sound quality, delivering their usual muscular noise-rock packed with psychedelic splatters and structured around sharply angular geometries. It's nonetheless a more considered record than its predecessors, opening with a pounding that reeks of metal bravado ("The Metal East") and launched headlong into unrestrained hysteria by the thunderous cadences of "Over The River And Through the Woods." The tension level is sky-high as ever, and the two deliver a wildly colorful party, always engaging despite a limited degree of experimentation. In any case, the "fantasy empire" at least has the conviction of being an honest tribute to what, in their best moments, Lightning Bolt have represented for the noise scene - and the slightly deranged one at that - of the last fifteen years. A tribute that plays out with uneven results, touring through pretty much their entire musical universe: the bluesy shades that surface within the folds of "Horsepower," the art-rock flourishes on math-rock footing of "King Of My World" (tracks that, all told, end up being good enough to fill the "business as usual" slot), the tribal-esque textures of "Mythmaster," the loose and "open" ones of "Dream Genie" (which update the idea of sonic trips built on distorted voices, spatial slits and assorted freak-outs), right through to the punk getaway of the closing "Snow White (& The 7 Dwarves Fans)," with the banner of Chrome firmly planted at its heart.

Between skies to ride, magnificent rainbows, hyper-magic mountains and fantasy empires, reading the titles of Lightning Bolt's albums always feels like approaching storybooks, only to then run headlong into one of the most unsettling and destructive noise spirals of the new millennium. No exception is 2019's Sonic Citadel, the seventh in their discography, which, to further the deception, comes wrapped in a pastel-colored cover crammed with princely towers and bright hues. The content is no exception either, with Gibson's heavily effected bass and Chippendale's chaotic, whirling drumming swallowing up everything in their path - but maybe this time something has genuinely, if ever so slightly, changed, with a bit more light seeping through the gaps and a number of, albeit timid, melodic flourishes here and there.

The opening is certainly not among the most comforting, with the classic blunt bass sound and drums hurling rocks in "Blow To The Head," followed by a shrill trumpet scraped out amid whirlpools of noise in the demented "USA Is A Psycho," which recalls the tones of Butthole Surfers. It's in "Air Conditioning," then, that a new air starts to circulate, with the bass standing in for the guitar and establishing a more linear structure, with less devastating tendencies. "Hüsker Dön't" follows the same path, a kind of touched and wacky tribute to Hüsker Dü, with the bass, here even more guitar-like, swaying through an epic metal riff.

The evolution is completed in "All Insane," a song with bulldozer rhythms, but a proper song nonetheless, with raucous yet orderly vocals and a melody pursued with real conviction.

Of course, along the way we find "Big Banger," which is indeed a big banger, "Halloween 3," and other brutalities that push the bass strings to the point of snapping and the drum skins to the point of bursting, but a new tendency toward melody is unmistakable. "Van Halen 2049," with its nine-plus minutes of ultra-distorted tapping, fittingly closes out the Providence duo's most accessible record, and also their best in at least a decade.

Contributions by Francesco Nunziata ("I Found A Ring In My Ear," "20," "Oblivion Hunter," "Fantasy Empire") and by Michele Corrado ("Sonic Citadel")

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