It’s albums like Hypermagic Mountain that show the uselessness of language, especially in an album review. Some catch terms you would expect to see for a masterpiece like this include: noise, spontaneous yelps, rock, pounding drums, crushing sounds, noise, rock and noise-rock. These labels are certainly fun and do feed the starving writer that gets paid by the word, but useless for the music itself. After all, music is the ultimate abstract expression, and high-quality music can be the most abstract. The problem with abstraction, however, becomes the inaccessibility of the very ideas the music tries to convey. Lightning Bolt understand this issue very well.

Their last album, Wonderful Rainbow, was a stunning work of riff rock blended with high volumes of distortion and manic drumming. Hypermagic Mountain starts with the familiar rhythmic monstrosity of Rainbow, but takes a sharp turn with the beginning of the fourth track. The band delves into ambient tribalism that blends with the heavy riffing. The polar combination of ambient and rock are unstoppable. To add to that, Lightning Bolt also prove that they know how to play their instruments; yes people, there is shredding here. They close with three tracks of free improvisation that toe the border between ambience, noise and rock. How can you not nod your head to this shit?