Lightning Bolt turns Club Soda into a beautiful chaos machine

I’m writing this about a week after seeing Lightning Bolt live because I cannot seem to get the night out of my head. The show was something I had been looking forward to since they announced it back in July, and after a venue change and a scare of selling out, my expectations were set very high.

    I first discovered Lightning Bolt back in 2018, when I was first thrust into the world of the online music cannon. Their album Wonderful Rainbow released in 2003, is considered an essential listen for anyone versed in artsy noisy slop. I cannot say I had a huge connection to the band before the show. I’d throw some of their stuff on while biking sometimes to feel like I was being chased or perhaps on my way to defeat some evil force taking over the city, but that was the extent of my listening before the show was coming up. That being said, live noise rock is something I’m always looking for and I became more familiar with their stuff over the end of summer.

    I’d seen a few clips of them playing live in the past. There are some legendary videos of them playing in warehouses, surrounded by a crowd instead of up on a stage. The energy in these videos cannot be understated. Their setup as a band is something worth admiring on its own. Lightning Bolt are a duo with Brian Gibson on bass and Brian Chippendale on drums. They bring the absolute maximum amount of sound out of only two people, both in the studio and live. Chippendale wires a mic up on the inside of his mouth, so he does not have to arch his neck towards a traditional mic stand while he’s furiously drumming. On top of the mouth contraption, he wears one of several homemade masks, usually colorful and messily stitched together, which ends up adding a sense of danger to the live shows. With all this in mind, it had been some time since I’d been this excited to see a band live, despite only being a casual fan.

    While biking down De Maisonneuve to Club Soda, where the show was being held, an actual lightning bolt split the sky between two buildings straight ahead just as it began to drizzle. This could be nothing but a good sign. I arrived in time to see the set of the opener, Crabe, who were in spirit very similar to the main act, but musically very different. Crabe is also an art punk/noise duo on drums and a bass guitar. They have been in the Montreal underground scene for over fifteen years now, I’ve seen them a couple of times before and they always end up being one of the more memorable acts. This was my first time seeing the band perform indoors, and this setting really worked for them. The visual work behind them fluctuated between shots of the performer's faces and twisting, distorting colors. The screens added cohesion to their jumpy, unpredictable tunes. One second, they’d be shouting over samples of bird noises, the next they’d be whispering over a loop while the drummer keeps time with one hand and plays the keyboard with the other. Their set was incredible, and everybody seemed to enjoy it. There was one problem, however; no mosh. 

    My brain is broken, and every concert ends up being an investigation into the demographic of the show as much as it is about enjoying and feeling the music. I love the idea of a scene that changes over time, I guess. I knew Lightning Bolt were legendary for the Pitchfork generation, who end up being usual suspects at these kinds of shows. The kind of people who were listening to Neutral Milk Hotel in 2005 before their cultural relevance as a weird meme and or reason not to go on a second date. Sure enough, the room was full of mostly darkly dressed, bearded men pushing forty, standing there with their arms crossed. These crowds are minefields of both the coolest and worst people you’ll ever meet, but often end up with the no moshing problem, due to age or pretension or something. 

I was scared by this point that there would be no movement for Lightning Bolt, which was one of the main reasons I was at this show. Their music is perfect for moshing, in my eyes. They are brutally fast, and destructive, but their abrasive style does not come from a place of anger. There is color to their chaos, and a sense of playfulness to their breakneck riffing. This feeling is illustrated very well on their album covers which are painted by Brian Chippendale himself.  A mosh pit should not be a place to get punched in the stomach. Moshing is a group dance; it’s meant to be a good time. Looking around, the crowd did not have any of the mosh criminals I’m all too used to running into at hardcore shows. There were no short, shirtless men to leave me covered in half an inch of their sweat. There were no agitated meatheads to launch me so hard I backflip onto an unsuspecting soul across the room. Yet, there was no movement.

Outside, between acts, I was expressing my worries when my drummer friend assured me that the odd time signatures and constant switching of pace in Crabe’s music was the only thing preventing a proper pit from forming. I checked out the merch table during the break, where Chippendale’s visual art was on sale as well as some homemade jackets. Even their merch table had character.

When the two Brians got on stage, maskless and dressed like my father, the room was electric. People cheered as Chippendale put the mic inside his mouth and pulled tonight’s mask over his face. With distortion, reverb, delay and a slough of phasers over his voice, he welcomed us to the show and talked about how amazed he was by Crabe’s performance. Gibson remained silent for pretty much the entire show, it was Chippendale who carried the stage presence. Lit up in red, and with the screen behind him fixed on the masked face, he looked like a dictator channelling his subordinates in some alien noise rock dystopia. He began just shouting into the mic before he started playing, the noise was already piercing my ears. They managed to maintain the energy of a bar gig while playing at Club Soda, which is a feat all by itself.

When the band started, it was even louder than I had anticipated. I was thrust into a void of noise and peaking eardrums. People were still not moving. My fears were growing. I had to get theoretical. When the music is fast enough, there exists an Archimedean point in the crowd, a correct person to push, that could catalyze a pit that will not stop for the rest of the show. My friends and I had this pathetic four-person mosh going when I accidentally pushed a guy in front of me. The following chain of pushes happened like clockwork. The size of the pit was snowballing, and I could not stop smiling at what we had created. By the second track, the pit was taking on a serpentine shape, slowly inching its way to the stage from where we’d started in the centre-back. By the third track, the snake had exploded in all directions, the mosh was a red giant, engulfing every planet regardless of volition. 

The rest of the show was a genuine blur. The setlist is unknowable and honestly hardly matters with this type of band. I was being thrashed around the entirety of the Club Soda floor, there were no limits to where the washing machine would shoot me. Occasionally, my eyes would fix on the stage enough to be fully bewildered by the skill being demonstrated up there. I got to catch a few of Brian Chippendale’s iconic stick flips that he throws in mid-200-BPM-breakdown without skipping a beat. The visuals on the screen behind the band went from vibrating stills of elaborate cartoon nonsense into sprawling animations of uncontrollable battlefields and other zany antics. It matched the music incredibly well.

The band took only one break, while Brian Gibson fixed something with the equipment. Chippendale stood up and started doing what was essentially stand-up comedy with six layers of vocal effects and a mask from an undiscovered student slasher film. He recounted a story about a lost spaghetti noodle inside one of their amps, while the mic was still deep in his mouth and every word still crushed my skull with walls of sound. He also shouted out the 1972 Italian song ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol,’ which was written in gibberish to sound like American English. He asked the crowd a few times very casually if we knew what he was talking about, he could not remember the name of the song.

When the band stopped playing for the last time, and the crowds shuffled outside together, it became evident that I had done some serious damage to my hearing. A nearby dep became infested with thirsty people yelling into each other's faces trying to be heard. The ringing added an eeriness to the world. I could not even tell what song was playing from the speaker above me. A man at the cash commented that he expected the show to be louder. I’ve meandered on this comment quite a bit over the week. It took three full days for the ringing to leave my ears, how could that possibly have been his takeaway? 

From now on I might wear earplugs to noise shows, since I’d really prefer to be able to hear in my 50s, but if anything is going to deafen me permanently, I think Lightning Bolt live is not a bad pick.