I hadn't seen or heard the band Lightning Bolt, but they turned out to be a great surprise! They were a bowl of electric energy under the damn hot sun, a batshit crazy nervous crisis under an etsy mask, a violent stroke disconnecting the senses.
The colorful duo from Providence was playing on Sunday afternoon at the FYF fest, and their experimental high-energy aggressive number took many people by surprise, me included. How did they maintain such an experimental crushing-skull-fucking-brain style for such long numbers?
During these long tracks, Brian Chippendale was drumming like a maniac while shouting echoing vocals in a mic tucked inside his handmade pussy-riot-y mask (or it may have been Hannibal Lecter meets Mexican wrestler) while Brian Gibson was following him into madness on a bass which did not sound exactly like a bass. They unleashed more energy than German cars on the autobahn, and more chaos than a herd of migrating gnous.
I think that they had some technical problems before they started, but they seemed to be the kind of guys to be able to handle it fast, and soon it was non-stop punk fury till the end. With the faded fluo colors, the weird look of the bass, and their guerilla style, they looked and sounded like the post-apocalypse band, the one that survives because it is the toughest and the fastest. Their music was accelerating so much it was having the same effect as driving a fast and out-of-control car or flying a space engine with no brakes in a video game. Of course, the FYF crowd, who would crowd surf to any music, Paul Anka's included, was doing its part to maintain the high-energy level. There was hardly one song slower than the rest, as they all sounded like some crazy adrenaline rush to the head, squeezing your brain, crashing your body into a bloody wall, piling riffs over riffs, noise over noise, without being boring at all.
At the end of the set the drummer, drenched in sweat, gave away many broken drumsticks to the crowd, he probably breaks tons of them each time.
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