Lightning Swords of Death – The Extra Dimensional Wound

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Los Angeles black metal brigade Lightning Swords of Death’s journey has been a strange one. After self-releasing their Plunder & Lightning demo in 2005, they were signed by Blackmetal.com. The small distribution website funded and distributed their debut full-length, The Golden Plague, which, along with tireless touring and a growing reputation as one of the best live US black metal bands, got the attention of Metal Blade Records. That brings us to The Extra Dimensional Wound, one of the finest black metal releases of the year. Like most good modern black metal, it isn’t simply an aping of the formulae of the genre’s progenitors, but instead nods to those bands at all the appropriate times while crafting a sound of its own. Venter of The Black Beast crawls at the pace of Burzum, but throws heavily distorted old-school doom riffs into the mix to keep things fresh. Damnation Pentastrike collides the triumphant fury of early Immortal with hook-filled, rock n’ roll drumming, losing some of that band’s bombast but none of their impact. Album bookends The Extra Dimensional Wound and Paths To Chaos invoke the finest moments of both Bathory and Mayhem, with the latter being particularly epic in scale: a twelve-minute song with devilishly catchy riffs and refrains sitting comfortably next to ambient atmospheric movements that seethe with energy. The most impressive thing about The Extra Dimensional Wound is that, despite its abundance of great influences, there’s really no other album quite like it. It solidifies Lightning Swords of Death as one of the dozen or so forward-thinking bands in the burgeoning US black metal scene that truly matter.

Written by Brad Sanders
More: 2010, Albums, Black Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Lightning Swords of Death