New Music From Lightning Bolt, 75 Dollar Bill
Lightning Bolt
Sonic Citadel
(Thrill Jockey)
Many rock albums feature an opening salvo—a burst of figurative gun shots, in the form of several high-energy songs, often the album’s best songs, to start things off and grab the listener’s attention. When it comes to Lightning Bolt’s new album Sonic Citadel, the whole damn album is a salvo.
It seriously does not let up, apart from just a few seconds of space at the beginning of “Air Conditioning”, which offers some “War Pigs”-esque blasts punctuated with cymbal taps. It seems like every crevice is crammed with sound, like the band is pointing firehoses that shoot lava directly at your ear holes.
It’s overwhelming to the point where all but the most hardy listeners would find it obnoxious, unbearable and/or unlistenable, but for those who crave intense music, it hits the spot.
It’s remarkable that Lightning Bolt—drummer/vocalist Brian Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson—has kept up its insane energy level for 25 years now, pounding out sonic assaults with a jackhammer-like persistent ferocity.
Gibson’s bass is severely fuzzed-out and manipulated with effects, often duplicating his note pitches into the treble territory, and Chippendale is both a monster and a machine, whipping out tight flurries of beats with a breathtaking precision.
“Bouncy House” is one of the album’s most playful songs, as bass and treble notes play a game of tag on a minefield, among heavy metal stabs and odd hints of the nursery song “Frère Jacques”, and the album’s closer, “Van Halen 2049”, is as intense a song as you’ll find in the band’s history, with an impressively sustained onslaught resembling speed metal.
On Sonic Citadel, the duo tries a few new things out that depart from the usual Lightning Bolt method; for example, Chippendale’s vocals aren’t quite as dementedly warped and distorted as usual.
However, most strikingly, two songs, “Don Henley in the Park” and “All Insane”, seem to dial down the intensity level just a little bit.
The glistening, echoing notes of the former are downright restrained by Lightning Bolt’s standards, apart from a hailstorm of interjecting drumbeats, and the stripped-back structure and sound of the latter provide welcome variations to the band’s catalog.
Otherwise, Sonic Citadel features the nervous, adrenaline-shot-in-the-heart ass-kicking and weirdness that fans have come to expect.
75 Dollar Bill
I Was Real
(Thin Wrist)
This writer needs to be periodically reminded that it’s not necessary for a person to feel like they need to be useful at every waking moment, nor do they need to check their email during any free sliver of time.
Increasingly, time to simply zone out in solitude seems necessary, whether it’s a 15-second elevator ride or a meandering, leisurely walk.
This comes to mind when listening to the new double album I Was Real from 75 Dollar Bill, featuring the core duo of guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown with eight guest musicians.
The band’s hypnotic pieces can gently carry a listener, making them lose sense of time and temporarily forget; it’s like an aural massage, with repeated movements that simultaneously apply pressure and soothe.
This writer wouldn’t call it meditative, because that implies a certain focus; 75 Dollar Bill works on another blurry level, where the stroll doesn’t have to have a precisely defined path.
In a way, this music can sometime be akin to an Indian raga, where a flexible, improvisational framework is intended to set a mood with a degree of uncertainty.
This is most evident on the 17-minute title track, which uses a bowed string drone as a bed (perhaps functioning like a harmonium in Indian music), but 75 Dollar Bill also channels minimalism, blues licks, Saharan guitar rock, just a touch of psychedelia, and even a bit of Irish fiddling.
Chen and Brown demonstrate patience and an economical creativity, where riff patterns and rhythms evolve beyond monotony with a gradual pace and small variations.
Chen’s swift ornaments and natural flow have a magnetic interplay with the other musicians, like on “Tetuzi Akiyama”, where he alternates between playing in unison and having a call-and-response exchange with the gritty buzz of Cheryl Kingan’s baritone sax.
Brown’s stripped-down approach, centering on slapping a plywood crate along with playing foot-triggered drums and hand-held percussion, is distinctive and surprisingly effective for such a seemingly modest setup.
There’s a special alchemy at work here; concentrating on the individual ingredients is missing the point, while enjoying the band’s time-arresting sprawl is rewarding and rejuvenating.