Bright Channel
Bright Channel
Flight Approved Records
By Jose Fritz
Historically we think of bands like Boris, and Sleep, Kyuss and
even BRMC as having the “Big guitar sound.” Let me tell
you about big guitar…
John Entwistle and Pete Townshend developed the classic rock guitar
amplifier setup known as the “stack,” the cabinet speaker
and 100-watt amplifier combo. The year was 1959 and the previous
standard was a mere 50 watts. By 1965 they were sold as component
pairs as a true stack. It was with a massive array of stacks at
the Fillmore East that the Who managed to generate 126 decibels,
the loudest concert ever. The date was May 31st 1976. [Guinness
no longer lists this category because they do not want to encourage
hearing damage.]
The reason I indulge in this distracting tangent is that for every
well-intended comparison Bright Channel may have to Joy Division,
Swervedriver or The Tea Party ultimately falls short. The live bootlegs
of The Who do not fall short. The Bright Channels guitar sound reminds
me of the largest guitar sound that ever was. They embody the sound
of live feedback walloping audibly off sound baffles in the echoic
ceiling of a massive auditorium. Their sound, as nimble as it initially
can seem, still pummels you like a hundred Marshall Stacks.
Ultimately Bright Channel is just a side project of Jeff Suthers
and Shannon Stein from Pteranodo, a toothless shoe gazer band. …And
there I think of the movie Deep Cover. It was a bad Lawrence Fishburn
flick but Gregory Sierra (while playing a drug dealer) utters the
memorable phrase “You’ve grown balls, well now you
gotta wear ‘em.” They were playing shoegazer rock
and sprouted balls spontaneously. They became Bright Channel. It’s
a goddamn miracle. In the immortal words of Jason Beebe “It’s
fucking loaves and fishes.”
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