Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 14/11/05
Label: Load

There have always been bands (Big Black, Swans, most famously) for whom extreme volume is an end in itself and whose rock is built of such deep, densely compacted and seemingly impenetrable strata, it's damned near Silurian. Then, there's Lightning Bolt. For two blokes with the mild-mannered name of Brian - Gibson on customised bass and Chippendale on drums and vocals - the two former Rhode Island School of Design students make one unholy racket. Their raison d'etre is to push the limits of sound experimentation and sheer, corrosive noise and their fourth album is a fine example of what might be achieved with a very limited sonic palette.

Lightning Bolt's closest kindred spirits are Death From Above 1979 (allegedly nick-named Politening Bolt by Gibson and Chippendale, although they deny this), but the Canadian duo have built their powerhouse by perverting both funk grooves and speed-metal riffs; Lightning Bolt eschew all such comforting patterns and rather celebrate chaos. At least, they have until now. Although "Hypermagic Mountain" is no less a terrifying, red-eyed and rampaging behemoth than its predecessors, the duo have unleashed a beast that assumes a more recognisable form.

Opener, "2 Morro Morro Land" is typical of the band's increasing interest in exploring the possibilities of rock's power, rather than in simply wreaking experimental carnage and thus hinges on a riff - albeit a colossal, viciously razor-ribboned one that causes shards of raw-noise distortion to shatter around it, such that the listener's instinct is to dive for cover. "Dead Cowboy", too, has a drill-bit insistency, the scale-annulling pitch of Gibson's bass eventually lancing the song's core and releasing a magma flow of pummelling, white-hot beats.

The jabbering "Captain Caveman" however, is as awesomely Neolithic as the title implies and suggests Bolt Thrower and Melvins wrestling inside a cement mixer. It's typical of Lightning Bolt's aim - to push rock forward into a ground-zero future by simultaneously bludgeoning it back to its rhythmic basics. If that reduction sometimes approaches the absurd - check the demented soloing in "Bizarro Zarro Land" - then no matter, the song always has the last laugh. In that case, by erupting into a truly unhinged, bad trip-imagining of Mozart joining Black Sabbath. The vaguely Faust-ian "Infinity Farm" is as close as the two, surely obsessive-compulsive Brians will ever get to a radio-friendly tune but really, that's not very far at all.

"Hypermagic Mountain" is a crazed and triumphantly out-there adventure that aims to please no one apart from Lightning Bolt themselves. Clearly, there are still peaks left they want to climb.

    by Sharon O'Connell