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Thursday, November 22, 2012
Lb.!
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Lb.! are built to cover a lot of ground, especially for an instrumental two-piece. Ryan's 8-string guitar is split between two amps--
a guitar amp/cab and a bass amp/cab-- with a variety of pitch pedals to expand his frequency range. David's drum kit is two kick/snare setups at ninety degrees from one another, letting him play tight, focused blasts, shift on the drum throne, and dig in for huge, heavy beats 
(seriously... can you believe the size of that second kick?) David rotating between the fast side of his kit to the heavy side is a lot of fun to watch throughout a Lb.! set... I've never seen a drummer set up this way before.I saw Lb.! as the opening band for one of the Mars Bar's Radgoat Fridays, and they slayed the crowd. They claim grind and sludge in their description, and they slip between blistering, breakneck grindcore and heavy, stomping grooves effortlessly. As an instrumental band, Lb.! keeps the crowd's attention with a combination of "can you believe that just happened?" wizardry and crushing, headbanging riffs. With David cranking out blinding, mathy, intricate beats, Ryan grinds out complicated riffs that bend, slide, and lock in on the complex rhythms, sometimes using tapping to play multi-octave rhythms across the 8-string guitar (rhythm-tapping, not Steve Vai meedley-meedly-me). Then the groove shifts, Ryan drops to heavy riffs on his low strings, David switches over to his massive kick, snare, and the audience falls in line with the monstrous sound chugging through the room.
Lb.! are fairly extreme; their shifting rhythms could leave calculus majors scratching their heads, certain to alienate patrons who come to shows for AC/DC, straight ahead bar rock-- but they're infinitely rewarding for people who want the extreme. They've got technical math grindcore lunacy and heavy sludge in equal measure, they're tons of fun for anyone who can keep up... but they're not big on internet presence. If you want to hear Lb.!, you have to go see them live (I'll list all of their shows on the calendar at the bottom of this page)-- then you can add yourself to the ranks of people who invariably start the next day with "I saw Lb.! last night... you have got to check these guys out."
Lb.! on Facebook
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