Band:	Lightning Bolt
Album:	Sonic Citadel
Style:	Noise rock
Release date:	October 2019

01. Blow To The Head
02. USA Is A Psycho
03. Air Conditioning
04. Hüsker Dön't
05. Big Banger
06. Halloween 3
07. Don Henley In The Park
08. Tom Thump
09. Bouncy House
10. All Insane
11. Van Halen 2049

Sure, a noise rock duo with just bass and drums is bound to be noisy, but what if I told you this is still one of their less noisy ones.

Calling Lightning Bolt noise rock is doing them somewhat of a disservice actually, in fact so would calling them anything, since they're pretty much in a league of their own doing their crazy and erratic noise cacophony of bass and drums and some processed vocals thrown in just to make the experience more confusing. There's really no way to properly describe the sound in a way that prepares you for what you're about to experience if you're not already familiar to Lightning Bolt. What I can tell you if you do listen to Sonic Citadel is that this is a band 25 years into their career and they've been even noisier than this.

This isn't to say that Sonic Citadel is an easy peasy listen, since most of the trademarks of Lightning Bolt's sound remain in their shape. Over the years Lightning Bolt have channeled their chaotic sound into something a little bit more direct, and all of the live intensity was something that was always hard to properly be captured on record. Seriously these guys' live shows are absolutely insane, with their preferred method of performing is surrounded by the crowd instead of on the stage, and also really really loud. So it helps that a lot of the time, their albums are also recorded live, but it still doesn't match exactly in that as great as it sounds on record, it can't live up to how it would be experienced live, which is a feeling that seeps into Sonic Citadel as well, though there isn't much I can blame Lightning Bolt for not trying to accomplish.

For such a chaotic, noisy and loud band, there have always been slightly catchy flourishes of melody, and nowhere are they more apparent than in certain songs on Sonic Citadel like "All Insane" or "Air Conditioning" where the vocals actually sing for once, but even at their most melodic, they drag everything through mountains of distortion. The more accessible songs and the more classically Lightning Bolt-ish tracks are pretty clearly separated in the tracklist, with the most by the books being the traditional chaotic long closer, in this case "Van Halen 2049", also continuing the record's nods to Van Halen, Don Henley and Husker Dü. Akin to their previous records, there are a lot more subtleties in the music and more clearly defined song structures, further channeling the chaos without it feeling like it disappeared at all.

A wild ride from start to finish, and even in tamer moments, Lightning Bolt still prove their vitality and the importance of their legacy of headache-inducing-chaos.