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Playing in the Garden: On Lightning Bolt’s Earthly Delights

By Jacob Phillips


Art by Bobby Hay


Recall the Hieronymous Bosch painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” If you disregard the uncanny fauna, the ludicrous architecture, the pig nun, you might say the picture was defined by the portentous dance of sin enacted by its myriad orgiasts. To score and embody this hedonistic scene is the M.O. of hypertense Rhode Island rock duo Lightning Bolt on their fifth album, “Earthly Delights.” Released fifteen years ago this October, the album is an achievement in volume and strangeness.

Lightning Bolt makes music for people who enjoy headaches. Scatter-handed drummer Brian Chippendale plays like he gets paid to hit each piece of his kit as often and hard as possible, while banjo-stringed-bassist Brian Gibson interprets the main rhythms into a series of fuzzed out riffs, over which Chippendale caterwauls into a phone-receiver microphone. It’s loud. The duo spent the early 2000s blowing out speakers and eardrums, before taking a studio hiatus. Their return album finds them operating on a spectrum of chaos instead of staying in the deep end.

If this album has hooks, they are the intense, cyclical riffs that Gibson lays into every track. Opener “Sound Guardians” is a frenetic descendent of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” Unraveling its rhythm through maddening jumps in tempo, the pummeled-out blasts of crash-accented bass set a tone for the competitive harmony they constantly labor to achieve. The song's stumbling act coda is a highlight of musicianship, as well as a “Turn Back” sign for already frustrated listeners.

Pseudo-random playfulness carries throughout the tracklist. “The Sublime Freak” rumbles with an elusive European folk quality, a jig the serfs would kick heels to. “Colossus” lumbers in with all the melodrama of AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells,” Gibson’s clean lead growls at us for a few measures until Chippendale’s cymbals come bouncing in, becoming a more uptempo head banger with a bobbing rhythm. “Funny Farm” finally milks some bluegrass out of that banjo string, using a grunge loud/quiet structure to tell an inmates-running-asylum nursery rhyme.

Chippendale’s lyrics get most blunt on last act rager “S.O.S,” which lists off three-letter initialisms (FBI, CIA, DVD, etc.) before repeating the existential couplet “Why do we kill?/Why do we die?” But the most lexically engaging part of any LB record are the song titles. “Transmissionary” is an especially euphonious portmanteau, even if its looping verse about heralding cat herders reads as ranting. The song itself is a twelve minute odyssey of a closer. A stampede of drums finds the bass swerving in with a grungy backbone riff steering everything forward, getting into such a swing that the listener feels afraid of being bucked off and trampled. Lyrically, 

Lightning Bolt is music ad absurdum. Listening to them is like fist-fighting sound itself. Who else could induce the blissful cacophony of God’s disappointment as you and your fellow revelers slam dance from Eden into the Underworld? If the mad scene here described is incomplete, a word of advice: adjust volume as needed.

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