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100

The Onion (A.V. Club)

Lightning Bolt exists in a wholly different context than it did four years ago, but Earthly Delights ranks up there with the group’s best work.

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The Phoenix

At its core, Earthly Delights is the sound of a band digging in so deep, they’ve struck something molten.

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Tiny Mix Tapes

Like Bosch’s triptych, the album is vivid and dense, clear as a bell but hellacious, and undeniably worth your inscrutable attention.

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Observer Music Monthly

It is also a sound that on this, their fifth album, seems as resistant to change as the forces of nature and while seemingly limited in palette, is as expansive as it is inventive.

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Drowned In Sound

It’d be rather too easy to sketch this as a record suitable only for chewing off your own tongue to: in fact, just like the Hieronymus Bosch triptych it appears to name-check, Earthly Delights is actually a work far richer in tone, shade and technique than its lurid sheen might suggest.

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New Musical Express

Out of the lo-fi punk/hardcore/black metal bedrock clatter of sound they create, lysergic and buzzing riffs clarify gloriously before melting back into chaos.

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No Ripcord

Earthly Delights shows that they have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision.

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Delusions of Adequacy

Music like this is a reward just waiting to happen and if you give it a fair shot, it will surely win you over.

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Pitchfork

Earthly Delights shows their career is less a series of sprints than one exhilarating marathon.

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PopMatters

Earthly Delights builds on the band’s last two successes, more concise than 2005’s "Hypermagic Mountain" and more stylistically diverse than 2003’s "Wonderful Rainbow."

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Sputnikmusic

The group has expanded its vocabulary and in general made its sound more broad and enjoyable.

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Dusted Magazine

It is awfully difficult to bring audiences out of themselves without stacks of speakers, massed bodies and the possibility of timing things just right, all of which only the right context can provide.

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Slant Magazine

The highlights demonstrate that these guys have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision, but by and large this is Lightning Bolt doing a Lightning Bolt album.

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Spin

Their unholy fuzz feels less triumphant, and the Helmet impression in opener 'Sound Guardians' is some kind of weird. Still, Lightning Bolt's basement has never sounded bigger.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this album is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 11 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

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Earthly Delights

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