Hey, I'm not quite sure how I generally feel about an album's capacity to take one (other) places . It's always been too much of an illogical stretch for me to fully endorse. I love that an album is a soundtrack , rather than the event itself. To me there are great romance records, great driving records, great cooking records, great Dungeons and Dragons (or Risk) records, great reading records, great walking-through-alleys records, great riding-on-buses records. My list goes on sort of like that for quite a while. So, it takes a special band for me to talk about The Place the music Takes me. Lightning Bolt , friend, are one such band. They take you along to their wild, alternately serene and violent, but somehow benevolent, land. Somehow it's not too fantastic either. More like a feeling you get from your favorite movies, if those movies happen to be, like mine, the tall-tayle of yore, your movies of the sword, stone and steed variety. Galloping horses and total-dwarf-anarchy. Lightning Bolt are in the ultra rare minority of sound creators that can transcend the mundane and lift rock music into a sort of spiritual realm, where discussing the place one is taken is plenty appropriate. I know that sounds dopey, but it's frankly true here. They're also really hard to ignore, with more sound producing power than is anywhere near healthy. Not healthy, but awfully compelling, enveloping and guts-shakingly beautiful, tonally. There's real nice feedback, fingertaps, fills and phone-mic singing and great duo dynamic. When they played Missoula a couple Summers back they also turned out to be nice, quiet unassuming folks happy to rock for the massed freaks. To the uninitiated, the music is most similar to the Ruins, Melt Banana and godheadSilo. So then, it was with great anticipation that I tore into this Wonderful Rainbow. Their 2001 Ride the Skies was the best record that came out that year. Wonderful Rainbow is equally compelling. It absolutely rips in fact. Moves along right from where Ride the Skies stopped and leaves more questions unanswered, somehow. There's more to contemplate when you get done with Wonderful Rainbow , I think. It does take a little longer for it to fully dawn on you what's going on here, but when it does it's bizarre as hell and great. This record features Lightning Bolt's most melodic and triumphant song to date, which is called Longstockings . That song occupies the Josh Vanek Current Favorite spot. John Peel's got to be playing it right now too, I'm sure. Lightning Bolt continue their commitment, Load gets it done, Dave Auchenbach does it right on the knobs, Providence continues to belt around the rest of the East Coast in the rock prowess dept. Good work.