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Earthly Delights Image
Metascore
80

Generally favorable reviews - based on 17 Critic Reviews What's this?

User Score
7.4

Generally favorable reviews- based on 20 Ratings

  • Summary: This is the fifth album for the rock band from Rhode Island.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 17
  2. Negative: 0 out of 17
  1. 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. 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.
  3. 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]
  4. 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.
  5. Earthly Delights shows their career is less a series of sprints than one exhilarating marathon.
  6. 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."
  7. 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]

See all 17 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 1
  2. Negative: 0 out of 1
  1. Jun 22, 2022
    6
    It's definitely not their best but Lightning Bolt continue to impress me with how complex their soundscapes can be. Nation of Boar inIt's definitely not their best but Lightning Bolt continue to impress me with how complex their soundscapes can be. Nation of Boar in particular is a big standout. Expand