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.