Lightning Bolt "Wonderful Rainbow" (Load Records, 2003)

Artist: Lightning Bolt
Album: "Wonderful Rainbow"
Release Date: 24 February 2003
Label: Load Records
Genre: Noise, Noise-Rock, Experimental-Rock
Mood: Uncompromising, Suffocating, Insular, Visceral
Reminds Of: Boredoms, Black Dice, Arab On Radar, Ruins
What People Think: AllMusicGuide, PitchforkMedia, SputnikMusic
Definitely Worth Buying: Amazon, CdUniverse

Tracklist
1. Hello Morning
2. Assassins
3. Dracula Mountain
4. 2 Towers
5. On Fire
6. Crown Of Storms
7. Longstockings
8. Wonderful Rainbow
9. 30000 Monkies
10. Duel In The Deep

“Oh shit.”

Inevitably, that’s what music is all about. Be it a crossfade, a sax bleat, guitar solo, or some wicked algorithmic programming, we listen to music to find those moments when you lose the right words and just lock in on the sound of something, the force of it. Not to reduce theoretical studies to a base oversimplification, but ultimately that’s what you look for – someone, some sound to make you look at the bottom of your drink and just say, “Oh shit.” Lightning Bolt’s music is entirely made up of these moments and sounds – riffs linked with breakdowns, disfigured vocals that resonate like mechanical laughter, splattering, tapped out basslines and breakneck drumming all adding up to one continuous moment, one single jaw-dropping experience.

“Oh shit.”

The genius part about Lightning Bolt, the part that takes them from being a great band to a flat-out amazing one is that they take those revelations from so many different places and twist them all together. 2001’s essential Ride the Skies sounded like a collision between Derek Bailey’s most non-idiomatic improvising and Eddie Van Halen’s pinpoint over-the-top fret board taps. At the same time, it was filtered through a cracked lens of hardcore and metal, lifting distorted bass sounds from Flipper, the teetering aggression of bands like Scratch Acid, and the flat out bombast of groups like Slayer. Adding more to the mix were the obvious influences from Japanoise bands like Ruins and Boredoms. The amazing part comes from taking all these sounds and turning it into something that doesn’t dwell on its references, but rather becomes its own entity – one with an intense mixture of fun and chaos.

Take “Assassins”, the second track from Wonderful Rainbow, for example: a quick screech, and then the sonic equivalent of getting smashed in the chest by a truck. Brian Gibson carves a monolithic bass riff out of his 3,800 watts and smacks it full on against Brian Chippendale’s drumming – a scattering, clattering mess of constant bass drum slams to build the tension, and then a release with enough manic fills for six other bands, all the while chattering through his distorted microphone (conveniently attached to his throat via a jaunty knit mask).

“Dracula Mountain” doesn’t let you collect yourself either, with galloping drums and a naïve sing-song melody that stops on a dime and lurches into a massive swath of off-time, bass drum heavy thumping and perfectly timed snare cracks and high note snatches. And of course, just when you get used to the sheer force of it all, that naïve melody comes back, bringing with it a serpentine little bass riff, some rhythmic tom work, and a plunge into what sounds like a Munsters theme song outtake.

“2 Towers” highlights manic improvisation before quickly developing a harder edge, with Gibson burrowing his riffs straight into your skull while Chippendale shifts the rhythm, alternating his fills with simple, pure heavy handed precision. And this is all while building it to a breakneck climax of insane bass work and hyperkinetic drumming. “On Fire” sounds like an alarm call with piercing bass lines that work their way to a low end throb while the drums pound away happily, showing that as hard as Chippendale plays, he matches it with a light handed precision, pausing only for a moment for Gibson to sound off, then launching back into the fray twice as hard.

Gibson starts tapping out the high notes of “Crown of Storms” only to quickly flip it back, contrasting a thumping low-end bass blast with Chippendale’s measured snare cracks. He works the tapping back in, letting the ascending melody rise as he tries to smack it back down. The pace quickens, the drums’ antics increase, until Gibson and Chippendale detonate everything – blast beats and squalling bass lines fighting for air in the relentless din. “Longstockings” almost sounds spare by comparison, with its simple, clean and melodic bass line and the straight-forward drumming and distorted vocals. It then falls, however, into one of the most intense and abstracts burst of noise on the record. “30,000 Monkeys” is Lightning Bolt firing on all cylinders – at times intricate and complex, and at other times hitting with the force of a jackhammer. “Duel in the Deep” finishes out the record on perhaps its most intense and noisy notes – equal parts aggressive and ominous warped shards of bass.

In the end, though, words fail me. I have such a hard time describing Lightning Bolt because it’s impossible to talk about their intensity, their talent, and the great music they create and do it all equal justice. If you want a truly accurate picture of Lightning Bolt, you just have to see them play. They destroy any notion of a fourth wall when they set up on the floor, feeding off the disheveled and energized masses as much as the crowd soaks up everything they have to offer. It’s truly an amazing thing. Wonderful Rainbow is a brilliant record and has upped the ante tremendously for Lightning Bolt. They managed to take every single aspect that made Ride the Skies such a great record and intensify it severely, all the while showcasing incredibly tight and complex musicianship – knowing when to hold in the reins and when to set them on fire. And yet it all seems so effortless. Every time I listen to them I feel like I just stumbled into the practice space of the greatest band in the world, only one that doesn’t know it or care. They just hammer away making music for the pure unadulterated fun of it, while all I can do is sit here and think, “Oh shit.”

(source: DustedMagazine)

“At its best, though, this album is like having a beautiful girl hit you repeatedly over the head with a baseball bat. Imagine all the best aspects of Fred Frith, Derek Bailey, the Ruins, Slayer, and Ornette Coleman all thrown into a blender together. Then imagine them on speed. This one's a keeper.”

Luomo "Paper Tigers" (Huume, 2006)

Artist: Luomo
Album:"Paper Tigers"
Release Date: October 24, 2006
Label: Huume
Genre: Microhouse, Minimal-Techno, Experimental-Techno
Mood: Trippy, Sexy, Lush, Detached
Reminds Of: Superpitcher, Vladislav Delay, Herbert
What People Think: DustedMagazine, AllMusicGuide
Definitely Worth Buying: CdUniverse, Amazon

Tracklist
1. Paper Tigers
2. Really Don't Mind
3. Let You Know
4. The Tease Is Over
5. Cowgirls
6. Good To Be With
7. Dirt Me
8. Wanna Tell
9. Make Believe

Finland's Sasu Ripatti is a man of many aliases-- Uusitalo, Vladislav Delay, Sistol-- but his best-known project is undoubtedly Luomo. With the 2000 debut of that alias Ripatti surprised the world-- or, at least, the world of techno-shut-ins and internet obsessives-- with the deeply resonant, unabashedly romantic Vocalcity. Until then, Ripatti's work had been marked by its drift, nuance, and noncommittal stance-- it was all haze and no solid edge. With Vocalcity, an album true to its name, Ripatti revealed a vision of deep house shot through with swoons and aloof, seductive female voices; for many fans of his previous, greyscale work, hearing Vocalcity was like seeing in color for the first time. Ripatti's next Luomo album, 2003's The Present Lover, was even more upfront; every song packed to the gills with shivering harmonics, breathy vocals, and digital goosebumps. At the time, bedroom producers were discovering not just rave but pop music, and vice versa-- when Kylie's Body Language emerged shortly thereafter, some critics alleged that the pop diva was taking after Luomo, whose star seemed on the rise. But somehow, nothing went the way it was supposed to. Caught up in contractual disputes, The Present Lover's U.S. release was delayed for months after its European release, and what should have been Luomo's big, splashy entrance onto the pop stage turned out to be a lukewarm wading-in. What's more, critics didn't fall all over The Present Lover the way they had Vocalcity. Who knows why-- maybe it was too poppy for their tastes, or maybe their enthusiasm flagged while they waited to be given the green light to write about the disc: American writers wishing not to alienate the album's publicists were forced to sit on the sidelines while the album came and went in Europe. Another three years on, and Ripatti's world has changed considerably. Force Inc., the label that first brought Luomo to fame, has gone under, and he no longer has ties with BMG, the major that fumbled The Present Lover. So far, so sobering. But the surprise twist to this workaday story is that Paper Tigers, Ripatti's new Luomo album, released without much fanfare a few weeks back, is a glorious, outsized triumph of a record. On the one hand, it remains true to the diehard Luomo sound-- indeed, it bears more than a passing resemblance to this year's surprising Uusitalo disc Tulenkantaja, which sounded more like Luomo than the more ambient Uusitalo project. The same tricks are in play-- brittle, overbright synths that shed pixel-dandruff with every riff; convoluted digital effects that treat sounds as though a great, robotic hand were scrunching them up into a ball like so much waste-paper; breathy vocals playing peekaboo across the soundfield, cooing and whispering, disappearing and turning up somewhere else when you turn your head to catch them in action. (Call it the "whack-a-mole" school of vocal processing.) And of course, there's that bassline: Listners waiting for Ripatti to do something new with his low end should stop holding their breaths, because once again, we're treated to that same dubby underpinning, bouncing like a Bungee cord that stretches by fifths. But Paper Tigers is also, in its own way, a total curveball. It's the most cohesive of any of Luomo's albums, by which I mean you can listen over and over again until you have no idea whether it's just beginning, or wrapping up, or pumping steadily through its middlemost densities. The hooks are less pronounced than on The Present Lover, but every track is very much its own song; Ripatti infuses traditional verse/chorus structures with his horizontal sense of sprawl until his tracks roll out like an endless, head-over-heels tumble. The whole record seems wrapped up with the very act of pop listening; the songs are at once hook-heavy and just out of reach. Hearing them feels a little like trying to rescue the memory of a melody that lingers on the tip of your tongue, a teasing wisp of a lick. The songs are as solid-- and as sticky-- as cotton candy. Rhythmically, Ripatti has never been better; in songs like the staggering "Wanna Tell" it sounds like he's trying to tell the story of a stop-start career in the stuttering advance of faltering house programming. And while for the most part the female voices Ripatti employs sound as they always have-- multitracked and harmonized six ways from Sunday-- they're more convoluted than ever, with one exception: "The Tease Is Over", whose simple, girlish vocals recall the Cardigans, of all people. "The Tease Is Over", of course, could well be the title of the album: Luomo is back, familiar and yet somehow freakier than ever.

(source: PitchforkMedia)

“Equivalent to watching a malfunctioning remote control vehicle bump repeatedly into one spot on a wall.”