Album Review: Oblivion Hunter [EP] by Lightning Bolt

Lightning BoltOblivion Hunter EP[Load; 2012]By Joshua Pickard; October 12, 2012Purchase at: Insound (Vinyl) | Amazon (MP3 & CD) | iTunes | MOGTweetIt’s always difficult to translate a ferocious live show into a comparable sounding studio recording. Just look at some of the best live bands over the past four decades and notice how they always sound better live, even if it’s in some rundown, back alley dive bar. There’s something inherently primal, spiritual even, about seeing a band tearing up some stage as fans scream and yell in a disorganized cacophony of voices, sweat, and adrenaline.

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The first time you hear Lightning Bolt's music, it doesn't hit you as "complex": it overwhelms. Brian Gibson's bass and Brian Chippendale's drums lash out in such a dizzying flurry that there’s barely time to sort out what’s happening in one track before they’ve moved on to the next. Their music is something like an auditory version of Chippendale's visual art.

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Through fully inducing our rational capacities for thought, we exemplify what makes us distinctive as a species. At our most humane, this leads us to examine our own behavior and past achievements in demonstrating astringent comprehension of physical and virtual worlds that are contextualized as a consequence of exposure. Explaining, interpreting, and conforming to the realization of what has transpired is quantified by meaningful demonstrations in an impossibly long and ever-changing list of formats, which exists utterly uncompromised by outer structuring or management.

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Providence, Rhode Island noise duo Lightning Bolt built their reputation on Brian Gibson's muscular basslines, Brian Chippendale's nearly possessed drumming, and the happy horror show that happens when the two meet up. Lightning Bolt started up in the mid-'90s, but took their time with slowly developing their sound, evolving subtly over the course of five albums in a ten-year period between 1999 and 2009. Released in 2001, Ride the Skies was a buzzingly euphoric proclamation of noisy mania, while ensuing records reached into the influence of both hard rock swagger and harsh noise textures.

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It is difficult not to see Oblivion Hunter , and indeed much of Lightning Bolt’s recorded output, as an advertisement for their live performances. The hyperkinetic, feral intensity of these tracks inevitably causes the listener to daydream about watching this stuff performed live in some dank basement, headbanging frantically while these two talented young men pound away at their instruments. I am sorry to report that I have yet to experience that particular pleasure.

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Calexico Calexico, the proudly Southwestern band from Arizona led by the guitarist and singer Joey Burns and the drummer John Convertino, left home to record “Algiers” (Anti-), an album named after the neighborhood where it was recorded: a neighborhood of New Orleans across the Mississippi from ….

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