by Sarah Knoll
The madness that is Lightning Bolt have returned with another LP titled Sonic Citadel. The noise-rock duo from Providence, Rhode Island have a signature sound that accompanies their performance style. Their last LP, Fantasy Empire which came out in 2015 is a ball of chaos and energy. The LP lasting roughly 48 minutes, consistently keeps up the pace with each track. On Sonic Citadel, they continue to do the exact same thing with a little bit of a higher production quality.
Opening track “Blow To The Head” opens with a combustion of heavy percussion and then bursts open with bass and vocals. In usual fashion, the lyrics are hard to decipher due to heavy distortion. However, they seem to be complimentary to the rhythm of the track itself, creating more of the flow of the song and having more of a relationship with the instruments.
What Lightning Bolt does quite often is mix hardcore rhythms with metal to make their sound. Yet they really stand on their own in many ways. Their use of pedals (or another instrument all together) breaks up the heavy distortion and rhythmic structures that happened during most of the tracks.
Songs such as “Halloween 3” offer a different approach to the structure so far explored on the LP. The track opens with haunting lyrics that are delivered like someone giving a speech to a crowd. As the bass rolls in, it overtakes the role of the of the vocals and echoes in a pattern that almost feeds back into itself. The track progresses into a strange breakdown of guitar, which reminds me of a distorted version of the percussion used in the movie, Whiplash. Towards the end of the track all of the instruments tend to mimic each other instead of descending into chaos like most of the record.
“Don Henley In The Park” was a track that completely came out of left field and felt a little bit odd in the mix. It’s one of the only songs on the album that isn’t saturated in heavy bass and drums. Although the track is intriguing and enticing as far as its relationship to the album’s sound as a whole, it feels very misplaced. The only true tie it has to the rest of the sound on the album are the percussion breakdowns that it has in various points throughout the track. Other than that it feels as if it’s trying to break the album up, but does so unsuccessfully.
One of the things that Lightning Bolt does well is build a giant block of sound on their records. In the first half of Sonic Citadel, I think they achieved that. However, what Lightning Bolt misses with that is the creativity. The sounds feel completely recycled rather than taking the sounds that they already have and upcycling it to try to figure out ways to keep things fresh. After a while the sound grew a little stale. The production for sure is great, but the songwriting seemed to lack a punch as far as creativity is concerned. Sonic Citadel isn’t a bad album, it just seems like Lightning Bolt didn’t really do much to level up on this record.