Lightning Bolt hits hard

Mike Newmark Assistant News Editor

Snickers could be heard throughout the indie community over the release of Lightning Bolt’s third album, Wonderful Rainbow. It wasn’t the music itself, which was met with unamimous raves; it was that darn title. Wonderful Rainbow wasn’t anything like the soft, colorful arc that graces the sky after a rain, but rather a colossal beating in compact disc form, where Brian Chippendale and Brian Gibson smacked the bejeezus out of you with lead pipes and bright rainbow-colored lights flashed directly into your eyes. Hypermagic Mountain, the title isn’t ironic, but spot-on. Named after the “X-treme” theme park of almost the same name, Hypermagic Mountain is a dozen roller coasters entangled with the carts missing each other only by the hairs on your head.

From start to finish, Hypermagic Mountain is an absolute beast of an album. Picking up where Wonderful Rainbow left off, this album again utilizes the very potent but rarely used bass-drums assault. The songs are more polished this time around, and slightly rockier as well. Recognizable and appealing rock music riffs manage to poke their heads out of the catfight, as on “Captain Caveman” and “Riffwraiths.” In fact, Hypermagic Mountain works as a compendium of various rock music genres of the last 30 years: muscular classic rock, thrash-metal, prog, noise-rock, hardcore punk and avant-garde silliness, all thrown into a blender and spit back out at 150 miles per hour.

The album smacks you around from the first minute and doesn’t let up until the sixth track, when “Magic Mountain” makes its chugging ascent to the top of its explosive heights and begins the process all over again. “2 Morro Morro Land” opens Hypermagic Mountain with a pelvis-thrusting classic rock lick that the band could have lifted from Van Halen’s Fair Warning. The track re-interprets the low bass tones, feedback and firecracker drums, ending with a syncopated bass and drum breakdown, in three and a half minutes. But the afterburners really kick in during “Captain Caveman,” a prime slab of Karp-style post-hardcore featuring grimy, earth-shaking bass locked into a dark groove.

It’s not all darkness and grime, though. Just to show you that they’re more in line with the Boredoms than Bolt Thrower, they toss in “Bizarro Zarro Land,” a song that’s every bit as strange as its title suggests. It begins with a lone bass hopping up and down in jolly glissando, but quickly mutates into a paranoid bass-drum-led circle of notes that gives way to a frantic, jagged polyrhythm. The song feels like a disorienting trip through a psychedelic funhouse at warp speed, which manages to be both repellant and inviting at once.

Because Wonderful Rainbow was such a masterpiece, the question of whether Hypermagic Mountain is better or worse will invariably come up. This is a difficult question to answer, but if I had to use clear-cut terms, I would say that it’s both. It’s worse because the upgraded sound quality extracts a small amount of the grit that helped make Wonderful Rainbow so cool, and there’s nothing on Hypermagic Mountain as oddly catchy as “Assassins.” Detractors can also point out that Lightning Bolt spends too much time copying other bands instead of refining their own style, though I think that’s part of the album’s appeal. It’s better because it exhibits a far greater range than Wonderful Rainbow while also ratcheting up the intensity, and the band’s willingness to experiment with a slew of styles showcases their ever-improving musicianship. While Hypermagic Mountain may be derivative, it’s still 100 percent Lightning Bolt, which is one of the best compliments that I can give them.