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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.
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At its core, Earthly Delights is the sound of a band digging in so deep, they’ve struck something molten.
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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.
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Like Bosch’s triptych, the album is vivid and dense, clear as a bell but hellacious, and undeniably worth your inscrutable attention.
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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.
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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.
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Earthly Delights shows that they have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision.
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Music like this is a reward just waiting to happen and if you give it a fair shot, it will surely win you over.
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UncutBrian 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]
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Earthly Delights for some, surely, and otherworldly torments for others.
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Earthly Delights shows their career is less a series of sprints than one exhilarating marathon.
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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.
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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."
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The group has expanded its vocabulary and in general made its sound more broad and enjoyable.
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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.
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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.
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MojoTheir 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]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 20
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Mixed: 3 out of 20
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Negative: 4 out of 20
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Jun 22, 2022