Lightning strikes Geelong - Lightning Bolt at the Nash

Now I realise I have been particularly tardy with this blog of late - and my apologies for that - and I may be exacerbating my guilt even further by posting here about Lightning Bolt for a second time (see 21st September): but their performance last night at Geelong's National Hotel (which is only ever called the Nash) was so stunning, so fantastically manic, that it would be a crime not to write about it here today. Not to mention the fact that it was so insanely loud that I am now too hearing impaired to be able to listen to anything else now anyway.

The thing that makes Lightning Bolt so amazing, beyond their music, is their presence. Not always, but usually, they set themselves up on the floor, rather than the stage, of their venues - with their audience crowded around them, pressed to within a bee's dick of their bodies. You can't help but feel a part of the music, as if the instruments that go to make up this frenzy of noise are Brian Gibson's bass guitar (tuned up to cello pitch), Brian Chippendale's huge battery of drums, and you.

Everything about this music - its speed, its density, its intensity, its volume, its frenzy - is extreme. It defies genres but, if you like exploring the fringes of noise, rock, metal and punk, chances are you will find something here to latch onto and, believe me, once you have done that, you will not, and will not want to, let go.

Last night's gig at the Nash was an incredible experience and there have been few times in my life of music where I have felt more part of the creation of things than I did there. You feel that your energy and hype, and theirs, runs intranvenously from one to the other, each cranking the other up a notch or two, back and forwards, in an orgy of musical mania.

It is well worth laying your hands on whatever discs of Lightning Bolt you can possibly find - and their latest release, Earthly Delights, is pretty easily available at the moment - but if you ever get a chance to experience this band live then you simply have to do it. It'll only cost you $30 or so, and your hearing for a day or two, but it'll be worth it, I promise.