Oblivion Hunter
Since forming in 1994, Lightning Bolt has taken a zig zag path to recording, playing and touring. Following in this pattern is the release of Oblivion Hunter, a collection of the band’s epic recording sessions over the last few years. Oblivion Hunter is a real cool time – loose, hard and loopy. From the get-go the sound is amped-up and free with an ear on the railroad tracks to the big sounds of industry and clamor. Bass sounds jump out of the speaker cones that conjure up ears in alien propulsion systems, nights in faraway wind tunnels, and brutal beatings at Gitmo. Drums and assorted FX pop in and out with the resolve of a finger quivering over the A-bomb button drunk on power and convinced of your need. This record is one of the few necessary things in your grim stretch of existence, played by a band with 20 years of total conviction to the destruction of your ear drums. The net is cast decidedly further this time out with North Pole square dancing colliding with shock troop whiplash, executed with the spontaneous interplay of neutrino collision. It is time for you to binge and purge. You are now the Oblivion Hunter.
Song: King Candy
Power of Salad
Earthly Delights
Last we left this amplified tribe of two on 2005’s “Hypermagic Mountain”, Lightning Bolt were tossing thousand of years worth of musical history into a wood chipper and coming up with some chewy chainsaw taffy. This new missive, “Earthly Delights” comes after two years of intensive electro-shock therapy driven recording.. The doors of Lightning Bolt’s practice space literally spill forth giga-liters of sweat born of echo-stretched dedication to archaeology of understanding advanced musicology. Taking the lessons of extreme meta and blood-brother marrying them to expansive and explosive song form and applying it to Olympic training methods. “Earthly Delights” uses electric stimulus to shock smile technology to worldwide domes. This is what two thousand years of evolution and the invention of electric instrumentation introduced into the tank of hook force can do to you.
Fidelity and attention to tune smithery are total, so please, dear listener place your alabaster hand in mine and embark on a musical journey that will take you to places both divine and sublime. This record has the sound of a ten piece band with a much tighter pay scale, matched with the sonics of military cartoons. This record is truly the sound of the air show ablaze with the joy of a ground-bound fighter powerless to eject.
Song: Colossus
Hypermagic Mountain
All killer, no filler follow-up to 2003’s Wonderful Rainbow, Hypermagic Mountain slams into hyperdrive for a full 57 minute ride. The songs are dense and constructed from an intense three week recording session deep within a psychic sweatbox. The band has blurred differences to any other sound pirates with this record using a primal base and a new musical vocabulary fueled by chemistry-altering volume and kick ass SONGS! Throbbing low-end played on a 300 foot long bass and kick drums the size of Exxon supertankers, all stretched into a triumphant war stomp that all can love. With just bass and drums (a two piece band you see) they have constructed the densest sound imaginable.
Power of Salad
Strap yourself to a 3800 watt two-piece freight train as it steams its way across America. Follow the band Lightning Bolt as they drop jaws in 19 locales from ultra-boho Williamsburgh, NY to sweaty Lubbock, Texas. its a wild ride that has some swank bug-eye film making from Peter Glantz and Nick Noe capturing 19 shows. Features cameos from undie rock celebrities, Pink and Brown, two epilepsy-triggering animations, a poster gallery and tons of other bonus gear. Time to realize the Power of Salad! Its got the human factor rolled in the mix with amp breakdowns, flooded towns, scary fans, and a menacing police presence. if none of this scores you, climb on board, stuff some napkins in your ears, and grab on to this slippery dolphin. This shit is wall-to-wall, Rhode Island to Texas to California. Talk to ’em as they crowd into a van two deep. This is no Guns N’ Roses style party rock, this is planet flattening sound waves that will make your croutons nuclear. Its not like they can’t move a crowd, au contraire girly-boy, they move the dance floor and make it a seething mess of cooking oil and sweaty limbs. Still want to come along? Well if time commitments have you down, this video is there for ya. Don’t leave the house pilgrim. Pull the beanbag right up to the tube, strip down, get out the ice cream and pull a Howard Hughes. COme on, the power of salad will save your pathetic life. Vitamins, minerals and huge battleship-sinking ROCK.
Lightning Bolt – Yellow Record
“Yellow Record”
This Providence RI-based duo plays a stripped down drums and guitar set-up. Lightning Bolt has been in existence since 1995 and has another full-length on Load, “Ride the Skies,” released in February of 2001.
This is a CD re-release of the LP-only release from 1997. Added to this CD are bonus tracks that were first available on a cassette companion to the 1997. The LP was had silk-screened covers and was available in an edition of 750 copies.
Since 1997 quite a bit has happened with Lightning Bolt. They’ve received lots of press in publications like AP, the Wire, Index, and lots of others.
Load Records is proud to present this first release in a new format from this shape-shifting, form-destroying, ear-crunching unit. Although their live shows have been marked by jet blasts of delicate sound shapes, this release shows sees the band playing with long sticky pieces of sonic taffy. It was recorded in the band’s Fort Thunder space, this CD shows them using delicate tools to kill very large creatures. This record is long and elaborate in its power but has some surprising delicate moments. The record also pulse with hyper-humanoid percussion matched with bowel loosening bass doing infinite hammer-ons to the gods.
Lightning Bolt has played with folks like Melt Banana and Ruins and share a similar sense of uber-absurd rockulism.
Coming for Lighting Bolt is a video/DVD and a new full length. They’ve just toured Japan and are going across the United States again in the Summer 2002 w/ the Locust and Arab on Radar.
Lightning Bolt – Wonderful Rainbow
Wonderful Rainbow
The much anticipated follow-up to 2001’s album Ride the Skies, Wonderful Rainbow pulls out all the stops. Recorded loud and proud over a year, this record grabs your throat with 8 songs of bass so nasty it seers human flesh on contact and drums so mighty they liquefy brain cells on impact. Yes, reference two-piece/crazy/heavy rock bands like RUINS, SLAYER and (Soul Discharge-era) BOREDOMS, but you’ll come up a few cents short on every pound of this two-ton heifer. LIGHTNING BOLT fill rooms all over this land, and this record is gonna fill the bill for those wanting extreme and heavy rock music taken to the top of the mountain. This is also useful for late-nite dance parties. Click here for an mp3 for your sampling needs.
Song: Dracula Mountain