#18 - Ryan & Steve

Lightning Bolt

Wonderful Rainbow

2003

Have a lot of built up tension? Stressed out? Have some aggression to let loose? Go take your car for a spin and let Chippendale and Gibson join you for the ride. Spin your volume knobs clockwise, and let this junkyard manic mess of a masterpiece rattle your windows and destroy your tympanic membranes. This duo does away with a lot of typical music standards and opts to create a bone-crunching, ear-splitting, noise rock album and I hope the Rhode Island School of Design is proud of them for it.

I have only seen these two perform live via DVD and I hope to one day be fortunate enough to experience them in person because while the record is good, I think the witnessing these two at work is a necessity. Lightning Bolt may not appear to be concerned with perfection at first. In their shows the crowd is surrounding them from almost all sides, joining the artists in their own epileptic attacks. Gibson wields his brutalized bass, only containing three strings and rips away at it with monolithic riffs and bottle rocket arcs. Chippendale pounds away at his drum and snare creating a scattering and clattering mess of unmatched ferocity. The drummer also pulls vocal duties. While he thrashes at his defenseless instrument, Chippendale also chatters into an improvised mask attached to his throat that supports the microphone to his mouth. His disfigured vocals resonate like mechanical laughter with the dirt-tinged bass lines and breakneck drumming.

In the end these are actually beautifully composed songs filtered through a cracked and smudged lens of hardcore and metal. The result is a mixture of fun and chaos - a brilliantly brutal record that manages to be virtually perfect and absolutely absurd. -R.C.

Wow. New listeners may not know what to think of Lightning Bolt’s Wonderful Rainbow when it begins, but just listen for a few more minutes…you won’t want to turn it off! This band has an indescribably keen ability at rocking out intensely hard while also keeping a half-beat off their drum pattern, creating a somewhat “flawed” sound that turns out to be refreshingly awesome! I rarely like to use the word “perfect” when describing an album, but I will say this: I’m not sure a band with this sound could have made a record much better. - Phil