Album Review: Hypermagic Mountain by Lightning Bolt

Lightning Bolt's 2003 album Wonderful Rainbow just kept getting bigger and bigger, like a 16-ton amplifier falling out of the noon sky. Its bass tone squashed round heads into wrecked ellipses, and the drums chattered away as if on a chain drive. The album was the opposite of Excedrin, a tension headache in ten movements. Lightning Bolt have done it again with 2005's Hypermagic Mountain.

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Although Lightning Bolt has existed since the late ’90s, it was only with 2001’s landmark Ride the Skies that the Providence, Rhode Island duo began garnering praise as the supposed cream of the noise crop. But labeling these Brians (Gibson on bass, Chippendale on drums and vocals) simply as noise artists places them in confines that don't necessarily do them justice. Granted, their music can be extreme, loud, and, well, noisy much in the same way as contemporaries such as Wolf Eyes and Black Dice.

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