Lightning Bolt

Hypermagic Mountain

(Load)

Record Review by Karen A. Mann

Listening to the cacophony that is Lightning Bolt, it’s really hard to believe that there are only two people making all that racket.  Brian Chippendale beats the living hell out of the drums and Brian Gibson tortures the bass, forcing from it high-pitched squalls, low, scraping moans and a host of tones in between.  Over the top of that, you have Chippendale’s distorted, strangled vocals, which he sings by holding the mic in his mouth, and the occasional burst of old-school guitar-god shredding.  Imagine a crash between two semi-trucks, one carrying a load of swine and the other carrying a billion bees. Now imagine an ice cream truck, with its little melodies set to permanent fast-forward, careening into that mess.  It’s not pretty.  But it’s so oddly compelling that I guarantee you’ll stop to look, or, in this case, listen.

What sounds at first like pure noise begins to take a tentative form under all those layers of fuzz and distortion, and flashes of strange beauty emerge. Beautiful like a twisted mass of metal, covered with a lacy pattern of dried blood left over after the bodies have been carted away.  Hypermagic Mountain is the Providence, R.I., band’s fourth album.  I admire anyone who can listen to it straight through without getting a headache.  I’ll admit I couldn’t do it.  But there are snippets and sections that stand out and beg to be played over and over again: the wooshy second half of “Megaghost,” which features the closest thing to a head-bobbing beat on the whole CD; the spooky and subdued “Infinity Farm,” which sounds like funeral for a bunch of dying birds; and the jittery, pounding intro to “Dead Cowboy.”