The video for Lightning Bolt’s “The Metal East” entered this world at 2:39AM EST during a block of programming on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, thereby crashing into thousands of impressionable young psyches as a nice little third-eye-opening aperitif before another rerun of Bob’s Burgers or Superjail. If this had happened back when I was 13, I could not have fled to Youtube to rewatch it. Like so many of the tripped out cartoons of pre-web-omniscience past, these He Man hallucinations would have blazed through my brain and then back out into the ether, perhaps never to be glimpsed again. Coupled with the legendary duo’s fuzz assault, the crew of day-glo space warriors speeding across asteroids and occasionally folding into themselves in a kind of body horror implosion might have seemed to me like something I dreamt up, or some fluke that the drooling public wasn’t meant to see.
But here we are in the light of day, with a Youtube link. Hell yeah. The two Brians bang their drums and shred their four strings, galloping through on-a-dime transitions and increasingly massive verses on the way to the conclusive beatdown — and I can immerse myself in Lale Westvind’s celestial battlefield for as long as I like. I’m in charge now, alright? You can’t tell me not to watch it again. And when the perspective shifts from the twisted armada cruising through the meteor trench under heavy fire into a quick trip down the black hole throat of that snake demon, and the face of the craft’s pilot starts cycling between various forms like some kind of kabuki insect recut of the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can’t tell me not to yell “WHOA WHAT??,” because I am going to yell it loudly.
Lightning Bolt’s triumphant Fantasy Empire is out now on Thrill Jockey.
• Lightning Bolt: http://laserbeast.com
• Thrill Jockey: http://thrilljockey.com/index.html
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