Lightning Bolt, Ride the Skies
Featured Album
The reason you've heard of Lightning Bolt: bend an ear to the duo's finest hour
Ride the Skies is Lightning Bolt's second album, the one that brought the Providence, RI bass/drum duo justified recognition. The combination of Brian Chippendale's hyper-kinetic drumming and squirrelly, lo-fi vocals with Brian Gibson's overpowering bass — which is pumped through a variety of distortion, octave and harmonizer pedals — make the group a force to be reckoned with.
“13 Monsters” and “Ride the Sky” showcase Gibson's trademark Eddie Van Halen-meets-Philip Glass technique of pounding out arpeggios with two-hand fretboard tapping. “Wee Ones Parade” starts with a weird dialogue between Chippendale's whinnying, Yoko Ono-esque vocal and Gibson's uncanny imitation on bass, then bursts into a typically crushing riff. “Faire Folk” has a clean bass sound and baby-talk singalong until the two and half minute mark, when it suddenly erupts into full-on freak-out carnage (which bleeds into the next track, “Into the Mist 2″). Ride the Skies is a definitive statement from Lightning Bolt's reigning period.
