Advanced Search Beta »
Basic Search Fields
Earthly Delights - Lightning Bolt
Metascore
80 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 17 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 17
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 17
  3. Negative: 0 out of 17
view
per page
  1. The A.V. Club
    100
    Lightning Bolt exists in a wholly different context than it did four years ago, but Earthly Delights ranks up there with the group's best work.
  2. The Boston Phoenix
    88
    At its core, Earthly Delights is the sound of a band digging in so deep, they've struck something molten.
  3. New Musical Express (NME)
    80
    Out of the lo-fi punk/hardcore/black metal bedrock clatter of sound they create, lysergic and buzzing riffs clarify gloriously before melting back into chaos.
  4. No Ripcord
    80
    Earthly Delights shows that they have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision.
  5. Drowned In Sound
    80
    It'd be rather too easy to sketch this as a record suitable only for chewing off your own tongue to: in fact, just like the Hieronymus Bosch triptych it appears to name-check, Earthly Delights is actually a work far richer in tone, shade and technique than its lurid sheen might suggest.
  6. Uncut
    80
    Brian Gibson and Brian Chippendale somehow manage to make a bass guitar and half a drum kit sound like a particularly loud avalanche, and then sneak in some tunes along the way. [Dec 2009, p. 103]
    All this publication's reviews
  7. Tiny Mix Tapes
    80
    Like Bosch's triptych, the album is vivid and dense, clear as a bell but hellacious, and undeniably worth your inscrutable attention.
  8. Observer Music Monthly
    80
    It is also a sound that on this, their fifth album, seems as resistant to change as the forces of nature and while seemingly limited in palette, is as expansive as it is inventive.
  9. Delusions of Adequacy
    80
    Music like this is a reward just waiting to happen and if you give it a fair shot, it will surely win you over.
  10. XLR8r
    80
    Earthly Delights for some, surely, and otherworldly torments for others.
  11. Pitchfork
    76
    Earthly Delights shows their career is less a series of sprints than one exhilarating marathon.
  12. Sputnikmusic
    70
    The group has expanded its vocabulary and in general made its sound more broad and enjoyable.
  13. Dusted Magazine
    70
    It is awfully difficult to bring audiences out of themselves without stacks of speakers, massed bodies and the possibility of timing things just right, all of which only the right context can provide.
  14. PopMatters
    70
    Earthly Delights builds on the band's last two successes, more concise than 2005's "Hypermagic Mountain" and more stylistically diverse than 2003's "Wonderful Rainbow."
  15. Mojo
    60
    Their fifth album still features plenty of trademark thrills - Brian Chippendale drumming junglist breakbeats at heart-attack velocity, bassist Brian Gibbon's' riffs sounding like a grindcore group playing gabba - while the bark-spitting tempo-shifts of opener Sound Guardians wouldn't alienate the Metallica set. [Jan 2010, p. 96]
    All this publication's reviews
  16. Spin
    60
    Their unholy fuzz feels less triumphant, and the Helmet impression in opener 'Sound Guardians' is some kind of weird. Still, Lightning Bolt's basement has never sounded bigger.
  17. Slant Magazine
    60
    The highlights demonstrate that these guys have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision, but by and large this is Lightning Bolt doing a Lightning Bolt album.
prev next
Page:
  • 1