Lightning Bolt

Wonderful Rainbow
Load, 2003

Sometimes the most interesting musical ideas manifest as throw-aways tacked on to an otherwise average song. There were two songs at the end of the 1980s that seemed to bleed into one another: Nine Inch Nails' 'Ringfinger', the last track of their debut, and the first track of Nitzer Ebb's album Showtime released just a few months later. Neither song was amazing on its own, but they both had a similar concept. During the last minute of 'Ringfinger', a melody made from squealing samples and fuzzed-out guitar disintegrated into the kind of sound a giant Tesla coil makes. If you'd played it backwards, you would have heard the song gradually form from pure noise without an identifiable starting point.

'Getting Closer', the first track from Showtime, began the way 'Ringfinger' ended. A few thumps here, a few thuds there, a sort of growing electronic pulse underneath and then – all of a sudden! – a song. It seemed to come out of random sounds purely by accident, as if you'd walked into a factory and tweaked the timing of one piston to hear Beethoven. I spent the rest of the 90s chasing that idea and hoping it would infiltrate popular music. It never really did and so remained a preoccupation of avant-garde and electronic bands.

While I was looking, three notable bands formed at the Rhode Island School of Design in New York where Talking Heads had begun two decades earlier – Les Savy Fav, Black Dice and Lightning Bolt. Each had their own peculiar take on pop music. Lightning Bolt and Black Dice in particular had a preoccupation with noise, often played at volumes not intended for the faint of heart. Lightning Bolt seemed to have taken the idea of melody-from-commotion and, rather than incorporating it into pop songs, lifted its most extreme point – that split-second where melody and noise are indistinguishable – to use as the basis for everything they did. On their 2003 album Wonderful Rainbow, they took the noises of punk drumkits, heavy-metal guitar and the mechanical sounds championed a decade earlier by Nine Inch Nails and Nitzer Ebb and then fed them all into a jet engine. Every single second of that album is like walking a tightrope between music and chaos.

DFA

Various Artists
DFA Compilation #1
DFA, 2003

It would have been fun to be in New York in 2003. Bands like TV On The Radio were just taking off, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were in full flight and the short-lived dance-punk trend was still, well... trendy. The basic formula for dance-punk seemed to be whiny vocals, dance beats and guitar riffs nabbed from late 1980s English post-punk groups like Wire and Gang Of Four. Cowbell and the occasional brass section didn't hurt either.

The dance-punk scene revolved around the DFA Records label, set up by the production team James Murphy (otherwise known as LCD Soundsystem) and Tim Goldsworthy with a mutual friend in 2001. Murphy and Goldsworthy produced most of the artists on their roster, including The Rapture and The Juan Maclean, and made imaginative remixes for other bands – including one for Le Tigre, where they turned the song 'Deceptacon' into a dance hit by slowing it down instead of speeding it up. The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem and !!! were the big names, and it was all greased with the adoration of Pitchfork's critics.

I wasn't in New York, however. I had just moved to Melbourne and was soaking up each new single at an indie club called Weekender, where my flatmate and I would float our Centrelink cheques on cheap beer and coins for the pool table and dance stupidly to old Madchester hits like The Stone Roses' 'Fool's Gold'. When !!!'s 'Me And Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard' hit the floor – dedicated to the New York mayor's introduction of dancing permits – it seemed like the late '90s had never existed and pop music had bypassed all that grunge bullshit and skipped straight from Madchester to dance-punk.

Once a week I'd skip whatever Arts lecture I was meant to be at and trek into the city to pick up the latest DFA 12" single from the record store Missing Link, and we'd dance to it at home on the balcony on weeknights. Our favourites were The Juan Maclean's 'Give Me Every Little Thing' and LCD Soundsystem's 'Yeah', which was a call-to-arms for bands to make better music that was released while the dance-punk trend was on its way out. Late that year, while I was out of town for Christmas, Weekender burned down.

Primal Scream

XTRMNTR
Creation, 2000

Primal Scream opened the 1990s with one of the decade's most uplifting records, and closed it with one of the darkest. Bobby Gillespie founded the group after leaving The Jesus And Mary Chain – where he played drums and most likely picked up a few drug habits – in the mid '80s. Their first album was full of jangly guitar and psychedelic pop, before they switched gear and recorded a follow-up inspired by noisy US garage bands.

At the turn of the decade, Gillespie and co. changed wardrobes yet again and hit it big with Screamadelica, a spaced-out tribute to a drug high inspired by gospel music and dance beats in equal parts. It found a spiritual home in the early '90s "Madchester" scene led by The Stone Roses and perpetually-drugged layabouts The Happy Mondays, and became the soundtrack to millions of brain cells being slaughtered by ecstasy use.

Primal Scream spent the rest of the decade reinventing themselves on each new album, none of which lived up to critics' expectations. Then, in 2000, they released a bombshell by the name of XTRMNTR. The first track, 'Kill All Hippies', opened with a young child's voice ordering an air-strike over the kind of creepy synthesisers you'd expect to hear in a dystopian science fiction film. When the beat kicked in, it turned into a bombastic dance club hit with distorted bass guitar and an ear-splitting finale. If Satan was living on earth as a businessman with good looks and a slick car, I imagine it would be his theme song.

In terms of volume, the second song 'Accelerator' starts where the first left off – and then gets louder to the point of discomfort. It's followed by a string of apocalyptic dance tracks including 'Exterminator' and 'Swastika Eyes', a single originally released under the name 'War Pigs' and later sung as 'American Eyes' in live performances. A Chemical Brothers remix of the song closes the album along with 'Shoot Speed/Kill Light', an offering to the gods of white noise and quite possibly one of the greatest air guitar songs ever released.