Live Report: Lightning Bolt

When Lightning Bolt came on stage last night at ten o’clock, the crowd were already waxing out their ears.

A blistering performance by Dan Friel who sat for an hour beforehand on a garden chair with his improvised board of gadgets and fairy lights, a kind of macabre pop coming out the worse with each haemorrhaging of cryptic distortion. Think of Blink-182 being tasered on stage by some sadistically bored farmer and you’re starting to get the picture. The crowd loved it. All were hoping to come out with some sort of lifelong hearing difficulties.

By ten o’clock the Button Factory had filled up and those at the front were as prepared as they would be for a bout of UFC, pumped for the noise rock duo from Rhode Island and ready to mosh. It’s been nine years since Lightning Bolt have played Ireland and by the fans’ levels of anticipation, such was obvious. The Temple Bar venue was wedged and even at the back there was little space to move. Lightning Bolt have a devotional following, a following exasperated by their long absences from these shores.

Coming unto the stage, Lightning Bolt’s drummer Brian Chippendale put on his signature mask, the kind of mask you’d expect to see on a Mexican wrestler if you’ve watched them dismally produced Luchador films, and introduced his tiny bass drum.
“Isn’t she tiny?,” he shouted, holding it up and declaring to the audience, his voice synthesized by the microphone in his mask.
Attached to the bass drum, he explained, a drum-synth and built into the mask is a microphone that gives the drummer his slightly deranged vocal range. Basically everything with Lightning Bolt is distorted, sound is constantly taken from its source instrument and aggravatedly harangued until it becomes a blur of indistinguishable noise.

Although the band have made seven studio albums, they are largely geared towards live performances. Previously they eschewed even the notion of a stage in favour of performing within their frantic audiences, at the centre of their curated mosh pit. Nowadays, with bigger venues (and more likely the nervousness of promoters and their insurance quotes) the band stick to the stage. Yet last night, as seems generally the case with Lightning Bolt this was inverted, and instead bassist Brian Gibson ushered a few surrounding fans to share the stage during the encore. Even from the back, you could see the hatred in the single bouncer’s eyes as he was made run from one side of the stage to the other in a worthless bid to quell the onslaught of fans.

As the band blasted their way through the set, what began as an unbreakable wall of distorted and relentless noise, began to weave its own enchantment. This was not the floods of noise you would hear with My Bloody Valentine, where behind the layers of distortion lie an undercurrent of melody. Lightning Bolt’s music is instead something like electric shock therapy where electricity is relentlessly pounded unto the brain until all that goes through your head is a flood of white noise and cathartic bliss. Eventually you have no choice but to go with it.

Whatever about the continued ringing of ears that still this morning make the reviewer worry that he’s got tinnitus; the energy between the crowd and the band made this a superb show of almost religious devotional intensity.