Staff Reviews

Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights

Review by Mark Powell

Whether you’ve actively sought out one of Lightning Bolt’s semi-impromptu 10am patio gigs at ATP, or you just happened to be within a 400-mile radius of the festival site at the time, you’ll be aware that Chippendale live comes across something like Seb Roachford with his knackers wired to a car battery. Happily, both Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson achieve pretty much the same Herculean level of deranged intensity on record, a fact that Earthly Delights takes great pains (quite possibly literal ones, by the sounds of it) to establish within two seconds of starting up, and then goes on to underline repeatedly with a blackened stump of crumbly, paper-shredding charcoal for the remainder of its 50-minute runtime. »

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last we heard this amplified tribe of two was 2005's 'hypermagic mountain'. on that album, lightning bolt was tossing thousand of years worth of musical history into a wood chipper and coming up with chewy chainsaw taffy. the new album, 'earthly delights', comes after scrapping two entire full length recordings. taking lessons of extreme metal and marrying them to expansive and explosive song form - 'earthly delights' uses electric stimulus to shock smile technology to worldwide domes. this is what 2,000 year's of evolution and the invention of electric instrumentation have led to - the modern incarnation of lightning bolt. this record has the sound of a ten-piece band with a much tighter pay scale, matched with the sonics of military cartoons. this record is truly the sound of the band's live show, ablaze with the joy of a ground-bound studio mastery.
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