After the opening band finished their performance at downtown club Soundlab, audience members anxiously prepared for the headliners to perform. Some flocked to the front of the club and flooded the empty stage, while others climbed on top of the bar when they saw the sound equipment being set up in a tucked away, far-right corner of the venue, a half-foot from the bar. Some stood just where they were, right in front of the band while they set up, while others sat content in booths in the back.
They knew what to expect. While most bands play on stage, Lightning Bolt opts for a less conventional approach—performing on the floor, face-to-face with their fans.
Heavy body odor, cigarette smoke, and alcohol breath lingered in the air of the seedy venue as people swarmed a bassist and a masked drummer. The stage, at this point, was overflowing with audience members. While others stood with little or no movement in the back, audience members in front of the band shimmied their bodies, kicked their legs and waved their arms fanatically, as the drummer bashed his cymbals and released a series of growls and shrieks. The bassist hunched over and twiddled his fingers against the frets, forcefully slapping the strings on his bass.
Lightning Bolt, a two-member Rhode Island-based noise-rock band, has permeated the underground hipster scene over the past few years with their signature sound and refusal to play on-stage performances. Their followers flock to them like a cult. Lightning Bolt’s musical formula is a fusion of inconsistent, frenetic drumming, ground shaking bass, and deep-throated, anguished sound effects, amplified through a small microphone in the drummer’s mouth. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing most people could sit through for hours on end.
Some, on the other hand, will gladly pay $10 to see them. They’ll even watch opening bands mimic them.
The band is composed of bass guitarist Brian Gibson and drummer Brian Chippendale. With their limited instrumentation, Chippendale and Gibson generate a distinctly creative sound that utilizes all functions of their drum set and bass guitar. But they don’t just play noise. Their songs are, at times, quite melodic in recordings. This concert, on the other hand, was not primarily a showcase of traditional songwriting, nor could most of it even be considered especially melodic.
Prior to the concert, I knew next to nothing about the band. The person who was supposed to accompany me to the show decided to stay behind after we watched YouTube video clips of the band’s maniacal performances. “Yo, they look and sound like garbage,” he said.
After dashing out of my 7 p.m. class, which finished at 9:30 p.m., hopping on the UB Stampede bus from Flint Loop to the University train stop in South Campus, trekking an additional half hour alone on an empty, desolate train ride to Erie-Canal, the last stop on the line, and getting picked up from the shady train station by Andrew, the equally shady Generation photographer, I finally reached my destination.
The ghost town atmosphere outside was a far cry from the crowded scene of 80-100 concertgoers inside the dimly lit, alcohol and weed-scented club. The audience, the majority from a mostly white American demographic, was an odd mix of fat, skinny, short, tall, balding, and bald. There were ferociously hairy men with foot-long beards, baseball cap-wearing college students, and 20-something indie/emo male and female rockers with their typically disheveled hair, thick, plastic frames, skinny jeans, and hooded sweatshirts. A 50-inch projector located high above the stage flashed psychedelic, fluorescent colors of pink, yellow, and green, accompanied with images of bright, whizzing landscapes during the opening band’s performance.
The pale, tall, lanky drummer emerged into the crowd, with a home-made looking, mustard-yellow mask sewn together with patched pieces of cloth material and covered in assorted colorful, cartoon designs, a small fluffy feather over each ear, and two small openings cut exclusively for his eyes. After planting himself in front of his drum set, he broke out in an aggressively loud drum solo. No announcements, no hellos to the crowd. The drummer then released muffled sounds of fierce, howling wind, squealing tires, and synthesized shrieks into a guitar pickup inside his mouth, which is the band’s only vocal communication with the audience. The bass guitarist followed suit and turned his amp up, intricately strumming his bass like a guitar, crunching out high volume, distorted metal riffs.
The concertgoers engulfed the band, surrounding them and their equipment in a circle, leaving them less than a few feet of space to play in. There were no barricades or bouncers. The audience members in front of the band fed off the loud music, with the thumping drum beats emulating a quickening heartbeat rate. Dum, Dum, Dum, Dum. As the drummer beat his drums faster, the audience shook their heads wildly, pumped their fists, flailed their arms, and quivered uncontrollably as if undergoing seizures, juxtaposing the people on stage watching and standing listlessly. Those standing on the bar countertop hung off the ceiling, flipping their heads from left to right and feverishly swayed their bodies. If you weren’t on an elevated platform or in front of the band, the performance was impossible to see. Others attempted to catch brief glimpses of the band, jumping up and down like jitterbugs, tip toeing, and peering over the heads of the people in front of them. The enthusiasm of the crowd seemed to stop in the middle of the venue. Concertgoers in the back stood restlessly, with little movement, casually taking swigs from bottles of imported beer.
The duo took few breaks, performing for roughly two hours in dripping sweat. The music defied melodic rhythm and sing-along lyrics. The drummer and bassist belting out a hybrid of discombobulated, synthesized sounds of wailing screams, and razor blades scraping against concrete with their instruments and vocals. If the band was singing, the words were incomprehensible. They said next to nothing, responding only after the audience chanted, “Louder! Faster!” There wasn’t any kind of mosh-pit exactly, but each new set of grinding sounds and drumming sequences jump-started the first two rows of the crowd as they reciprocated their appreciation by fiercely convulsing their bodies and enthusiastically shoving their peers. It was so crowded, any movement turned into an uncontrollable wave of bodies.
The band broke out its final song, ending the continuous performance with Chippendale banging it out with a long drum solo, pounding the cymbals with his sticks and jerking his foot harder against the drum pedal. Even the audience members on stage started to nod their heads like bobble dolls as they fixated their eyes on Gibson frenziedly sliding his fingers up and down his strings. The crowd erupted in applause.
While their music may not be traditional or coherent, they captured the crowd with a vigorous, high energy, unique, non-stop performance. By going against the standard schema of concerts, placing audience members on the stage and performing on the floor of the venue, the band is proving that the crowd is a component of their performance which is just as important as they are. Lightning Bolt eliminates barriers, choosing a truly intimate setting by playing openly in front of their energetic, passionate fans.
