3 out of 5

Label: Load

Produced by: Dave Auchenbach (recorded by, mixed by)

Slabs and slabs of riffage and volume. Are you surprised?

When it comes to assaultive bands of the LB variety – Bolt’s version of this being fuzzed-up, non-stop drum pummeling with distorted and howled vocals, and blast beat bass lines which occasionally pause to jam and rock out – I’m always fascinated with how they find comparative loudness within their generally loud register. It makes sense that the band has been chipping away at this formula the whole while; when they possibly “solved” for it on Hypermagic Mountain, it’s tough to know where to go from there. Thankfully, part of the band’s craft celebrates staying within their lane, as that lane is fully supportive of slabs of riffage and volume, i.e. you can get pretty far by waiting a few years and then dropping another Lightning Bolt delivery of extremes, because, despite peers and followers doing something similar, drummer Brian Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson have a particularly roving and intense version of it that remains identifiably them, and rewards checking out what’s new (and also rewards comparing that to what’s passed, perhaps being surprised at how the sound can vary over time).

Earthly Delights – if we want to apply any meaning to album titles – seems to “ground” their concept by going both BIGGER and maybe also willfully WEIRDER. This doesn’t amount to many surface level changes, as you’ll still know this to be a Lightning Bolt disc, but it feels like the duo spreads their sound out a bit more, allowing for some breathing room… then gives us what we want by obliterating any of that space through most songs’ escalating, terrifying conclusions of rapid-fire everything. Openers Sound Guardian and Nation of Boar follow this template, but the latter sticks to an almost poppy beat for part of its runtime, which leads into the excellent – and well-titled – Colossus, during which Chippendale actually sticks to a standard, heartbeat pace for most of the track, allowing the intensity to build to its inevitable conclusion.

The Brians are able to trade off spotlights at points using this approach, which pays off in the album’s ending, which goes for the two sides of the LB coin: S.O.S.’s death-to-your-ears punkiness, and Transmissionary’s post-rock-esque peaks and valleys, relative to the band’s preference for peaks.

Still, the high level repetitiveness of the structure – some palatable noise, then chaos – can blend together, and the album’s middle feels like a test of more experimental waters, going jazz improv at points, and then fiddling with a folky riff on Funny Farm before, again, destroying it with noise; these experiments are not uninteresting, but allotting them to the disc’s middle ends up padding the runtime instead of buoying it.