Favorite records entry #99
October 5, 2009
Lightning Bolt ~ Wonderful Rainbow
Lightning Bolt’s career has never touched the mainstream, and I highly doubt they care. The band has always been firmly rooted in the underground, and they seem content to remain there. This suits me fine, because their brand of musical madness is such that if they ever do receive mainstream notice, I’ll look at humanity as a lot more open-minded than any jaded music lover has ever given them credit for. That aside, this is headache music of the highest order. Meant to be played at excessive volumes and flailed around to at your leisure.
Wonderful Rainbow is to this day, the most varied thing Lightning Bolt has ever done. Although they play the kind of music where the term ‘variety’ kind of loses it’s meaning, it’s sometimes nice to alternate between skull throbbingly aggressive at a fast tempo and skull throbbingly aggressive at a bit slower but still fast tempo. This is music driven by it’s forward momentum. Once things pick up, stopping is fatal to the ebb and flow of the song. Lightning Bolt knows this, and as the album progresses, things become more and more primal, and by the end of the record, it’s evolved into what can be best called ’symphonic white noise’, the massive, throbbing wall of sound constantly assaulting the listener. Lightning Bolt is not ’smart music’, nor have they ever expressed the desire to play anything with the notion of intelligence in the first place. What Lightning Bolt has strived and admirably achieved with some consistency Is to kick you in the skull as fast, hard and aggressively as possible with only drums and bass. God bless their souls.
