E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ride the Lightning Providence’s most spastic band fly over the Rainbow BY SEAN RICHARDSON

The new Lightning Bolt album, Wonderful Rainbow (Load), is one of the year’s noisiest underground-rock releases. Yet as its title suggests, it’s also one of the most bucolic. The Providence duo like feedback and spastic beats as much as any other artcore outfit, but when it comes to melody, they reject doom and gloom in favor of a warped sense of humor that verges on outright joy. It’s a combination that’s made the band — bassist Brian Gibson and drummer Brian Chippendale — cult heroes on the US avant-punk scene.

"We practice every day, and there are all kinds of different moods that come out when we play," says Gibson over the phone from Phoenix, where he and Chippendale are getting an oil change before heading off to play a show in Flagstaff. "A lot of the time, there’s this ecstatic mood that we get into that seems like it stands out more from other things I hear. Loud music has always been associated with aggression and pain, stuff like that. I think both of us are striving to create feelings that are being neglected in the music world."

Next week, Lightning Bolt are capping off their current six-week tour with a pair of New England shows: one on Thursday October 30, with labelmates Noxagt and the USA Is a Monster, at Mass Art, and another the next day at a clandestine location in Providence. The band have been touring since 1997, but things really started to pick up after the release of their 2001 disc Ride the Skies (Load), which led to tours with Sonic Youth and the Locust. The Lightning Bolt concert experience is almost as unusual as their music: Chippendale wears a mask and sings with a microphone in his mouth, Gibson plays through a souped-up amp, and they always set up in front of (not on) the stage.

"When we started, there were a lot of crazy things going on at RISD," Gibson explains. "There were marching bands, and costumes were a huge aspect of what was going on. We were just one of the few to incorporate that kind of thing." As for the band’s habit of not playing through the house PA, he says it’s a simple matter of not wanting to be at the mercy of a soundman. "We’re definitely into how everything about us is so compact. The sound is coming out of a small space, but it’s really loud and it still fills the room. I think that might be why people respond to it, because it’s a different type of loud than you normally get at a club."

More than a few Lightning Bolt fans have compared Gibson’s effects-heavy fretboard mangling on Wonderful Rainbow to certain metal gods of yesteryear. "There actually isn’t as much Van Halen or AC/DC as people might think," he insists. "The one classic-rock band I liked in high school was the Who. If you listen to Live at Leeds, they’re playing rock songs, but I felt like what they really wanted was just huge amounts of noise and Keith Moon flipping out on drums. I think our attitude comes from the same place. Sometimes the energy of a song just builds up to a point where you don’t even want to be playing the song anymore. You just want to be immersed in the noise."

Lightning Bolt perform next Thursday, October 30, at 7:30 p.m. in the courtyard of Massachusetts College of Art, 621 Huntington Avenue. Tickets are $5; call (617) 879-7000, or visit www.eximiousproductions.com.