Listening to Lightning Bolt requires a certain mindset for me. Like Morrissey once said, "the music that they constantly play/it says nothing to me about my life". Well, Lightning Bolt does say a lot to me even though I can't hear most of what Brian Chippendale is singing ((Which is very similar to my relationship with Einstürzende Neubauten, the difference being that I don't understand German.))!

Normally I would laud a band simply for breaking boundaries and norms, but the music that these two guys play is so good that I can't imagine living without it. Granted, I don't like much of what they've done before their fourth album, "Hypermagic Mountain", but they've earned an integral bit of my heart for creating very dense, extremely drum-filled and drone-melodic songs. The distorted singing and their unique stage-approach warms me up even more. Their music primitively pin-points and hits some sort of "hard-core feel", as Ari Up would put it.

Their new album, "Earthly Delights", is released 2009-10-13, which means it's time to pre-order it from Load Records!

Here's a nicely shot and edited little video that features bits of old songs but also part of "Sound Guardians", the track I'd first recommend off their new LP - which is at the time of writing available for a listen here.

Here's a nice little video thing where Lightning Bolt is compared with Sun Ra Arkestra, a more jazzy but equally experimental and searching sort of band.

The third track off their coming album is called "Colossus" and appears here courtesy of Load Records. It's a notably slow track, for being Lightning Bolt:

[audio:http://www.loadrecords.com/sound/03-Colossus.mp3]