my Own Lightning

Before endeavoring into AWOLNATION’s ferocious fourth studio album, band architect Aaron Bruno almost lost everything in 2018. “My studio burned down in the Woolsey Fire,” he tells Apple Music. “So this record was made in my bedroom.” But lo-fi it is not: The Los Angeles band, best known for 2011’s monolithic single “Sail,” has only become more ambitious in its approach to genre-agnostic alternative. There’s riff-forward adrenaline epics (“The Best”), booming bluesy punk (“Battered, Black & Blue [Hole in My Heart]”), sunny power pop (“Pacific Coast Highway in the Movies”), and vaudevillian electro-pop (“Slam [Angel Miners]”). Even the title, Angel Miners & the Lightning Riders, is representative of Bruno’s enterprising spirit—the album loosely follows a mythology of his own creation, used to make sense of inexplicable tragedy.

Before emerging as a cult star in the 1970s, Lowell George was a presence on the L.A. folk-rock/psychedelic scene in the 1960s. With his group the Factory, he only managed to release one single during this time. Lightning-Rod Man rescues 15 tunes cut by this unit, including the single and over a dozen outtakes and demos. Almost exclusively original material, most of these tracks were recorded in 1966 and 1967. They show the group pursuing a slightly eccentric folk-rock vision that neither bears much similarity to George's more famous work nor matches the best work done in this genre by their L.A. peers. At times they echo Kaleidoscope in their vaguely spacy, good-natured folkish rock; just as often, they take cues from Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa in their skewed blues-rock and obtuse songwriting. In fact, Zappa himself produced and played on a couple of the demos, and one-time Mothers of Invention members Elliot Ingber and Roy Estrada show up on a few others. A few songs cut toward the end of the decade feature a heavier, bluesier sound that show George edging in a different direction. An enjoyable vault find, but not a major revelation.