Lightning Bolt and the Freakout Duo Tradition
When Lightning Bolt begins to play, it's like a stealth attack. While the other bands are onstage, still playing, the members of Lightning Bolt typically set up their equipment on the floor?just a drum set and big bass rig. They start before the people in the crowd have the chance to escape, have a drink, go outside for smokes, go to the bathroom to make out. They've even been known to start playing before the previous band is even done with their set; it's just time for the bomb to go off.
Lightning Bolt is just two men, Brian Gibson on "2300 watt bass" and Brian Chippendale on drums and vocals?which are amplified (hoarsely) through a throat-contact mic. These things sound more like weapons than musical instruments, and that's probably the way they like it. Partly for the comedy angle in it?they sometimes wear costumes and goofy headgear, which is what reviewers tend to notice about them?but probably also to psych themselves up, to get themselves in the mood for battle waged with noise.
Lightning Bolt is the most manic, musically hyperactive band to come around since Melt Banana, and the Boredoms before that, and Naked City before that, and Napalm Death before that, and Beefheart before that. The two of them pour so much energy into three minutes of rock that the crowd needs to take 20 seconds or so to cool down between songs. Gibson's bass, brought by noisy, gritty feedback to a Wagnerian level of evil grandeur, explores the brink between the tightfisted control of math-rock and orgasmic psychedelia; Chippendale has absorbed every how-did-he-get-so-fast drummer from Keith Moon to Dave Lombardo to Joey Baron.
The Boredoms, Melt Banana, Napalm Death, Spazz?all fair comparisons, since Lightning Bolt keep alive the manic jazzcore tradition quite ably, but their minimalism is their real strength. They're able to conjure incredible noise and rapid momentum with just two instruments. More would probably just get in the way. In that, they more resemble Godheadsilo?who were Tasmanian noise-devils before they delved too deeply into their obsession with metal iconography?and the Ruins, the granddaddy of all avant-noise duos. There has been a handful of these groups over the years, but for the most part the whole avant-noise-manic-jazzcore duo thing remains unexplored territory.
Many of the groups that reduce to two find greater strength and greater freedom than they do in their other, larger bands?like the Chicago Underground Duo, who recently opened up for Isotope 217 on tour and showed themselves to be much more imaginative than the bigger band, or Quasi, in which Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes play with sound more cleverly than they did in Sleater-Kinney or (shiver) in Heatmiser. (Those who play in twos to maximize noise and confusion never have other priorities.) Reduction to two instruments is elemental, and it usually takes a lot of guts and smarts to do it. In the case of Lightning Bolt and the freakout duo tradition, it takes lots of speed, too, along with a flipside of cleansing, inquisitive slowness. The Ruins play superfast to envelop the listener in frantic energy, but like all the greatest speed bands, they don't have to play so fast, and a lot of the time they don't. Slowness brings cinematic elevation and an element of tragedy. The Melvins were once, a long time ago, a Germs-meets-Kill 'Em All speed band until they discovered the glorious and illustrative power of slowing the assault down to a never-ending arc of frozen metallic noise. The Boredoms, who perfected the fast-forward cartoon-violence sound, have been in their new trance-psych phase since before Clinton's impeachment. And the Ruins, proving that they don't need to play fast to cover up a dearth of instrumentation, turned prog and grandiose on Symphonica a few years back. (Temporarily, as it turned out.)
Lightning Bolt are from Providence?home of the Freak Rock Explosion, they say?and they've been around for about five years, though there was an hiatus while Gibson was out of town for a while. ("Brian Gibson has moved back to Providence and work has commenced on regaining the loudest band in the world title," reads an old news posting on their label's website. "The bass rig is rumored to be 1600 watts.") They were originally a three-piece, interestingly enough, and their former vocalist, Hisham, is now the drummer in the somewhat similarly minded, Brooklyn-based Black Dice.
Providence has been home to crazy, low-brow avant-garde music for a long time now, since Sam McPheeters of Men's Recovery Project relocated his essential Vermiform label there; of course, even when he was in Born Against, the most important New York hardcore band of the early 90s, McPheeters was an outsider?he was living in Weehawken. (Once again, he's out before the flood: Vermiform is now located in Claremont, CA.)
On Lightning Bolt's second album, Ride the Skies (Load), it's not all prestidigitation, though there's a lot of that. An awful lot. The fast parts are the most jaw-dropping stuff of the album, like Gibson's muff-pedaled bass arpeggios on "13 Monsters" and "Ride the Sky," where he sounds like the Dionysian bass demon that torments Geddy Lee in his sleep. Or the crunchy double-stringed?are those octaves??swimming-in-place parts in the last track, "Rotator."
But elsewhere, Gibson and Chippendale loosen up and slow down, and seem more like mad scientists simply playing with noise. "Into the Mist 2" is just a drunkenly lopsided series of boingy sound effects, presumably coming from the bass, and rolling, jazzy drum fills. It's like punching a jack-in-the-box and watching it bounce around, with a maniacal smile on its face no matter how much you pummel it. "Wee One's Parade" is more squeak-fart stuff on the bass and goofy call-and-response vocal interjections that are alternately apelike and horselike. No beat, no mosh, no sweaty speed freakout. Just love of noise.