Chicago Stone Lightning Band to release debut album on Downtown Records

Chicago Stone Lightning Band
Chicago Stone Lightning Band (Downtown Records)

Available September 18, 2012

Like a bolt shot from the skies on the wild west side of town, the Chicago Stone Lightning Band strikes fast and memorably on its debut album. As its elementally-inspired name suggests, the band strips rock, blues and soul down to its, natural, most potent essentials on its long player: the sound of two guitars blazing, raw emotions bared straight to a microphone, a rhythm section pouring it on like lives depended on it.

Borne from Chicago’s fertile music underground, the members of Chicago Stone Lightning Band have several lifetimes worth of rock experience between them. But the CSLB sound, unabashedly inspired by the British electric blues of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, American boogie rock, great American folk, electric blues, Northern Soul spun through decades of underground music—mod rock, garage, punk, space rock and drone—reunites Chicago with the electric blues with its primal vitality intact. On its debut album, Chicago Stone Lightning Band comes at us like a force of nature. It goes without saying that CSLB bears little resemblance to the microtrends heard on the music blogs today. 

Why should it? CSLB’s roots run deeper than last season’s blog hype. Frontman Ben Pirani, the son of professional musicians, was raised in Maywood, IL. Growing up in Chicago’s live music underground brought his buoyant personality and passion to the city’s punk, mod, metal scenes as a drummer and guitar player. CSLB, it should be said, is the first vehicle where Pirani takes the principal songwriting role. Now based in Brooklyn, soul collector Pirani still deejays Chicago’s always packed Windy City Soul Club dance party. Guitar player Nick Myers also fronts VEE DEE, a blistering psych-garage act. 

When the band formed a few years back, it filled out its set with blues classics, I Don’t Worry About a Thing, Please Stop Messin’ Around and Like It This Way, all played at a blistering clip and eardrum threatening volume. In those staples of the band’s early sets, Pirani and Myers honed the interplay between their guitars that makes the band’s originals so electrifying. Live gigs with the likes of Disappears, Mannequin Men, Black Diamond Heavies, Hollows, Radio Moscow, New Jersey's Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and Milwaukee's Kings Go Forth ensued. Soon the band emerged with a self-released single, “My Love is a Good Look” (recorded in a new version for the debut album) and video. Next, it wrote an album. 

Recorded straight to analog tape with Chicago engineer and producer Zach Goheen (Cass McCombs, JT Nero), often entirely live with minimal overdubbing and absolutely no effects pedals, the band’s debut is an unadulterated and unfiltered document of a band operating at full-tilt. CSLB’s ferocious volume, inspired soloing and Pirani’s soul-bearing vox are all there. It sounds like very little other music you will hear released in 2013 and come to think of it, that’s precisely the point.

Chicago Stone Lightning Band:

Ben Pirani: guitar/vox/keys
Nick Myers: guitar/backup vox/handclaps
Gabe McDonough: bass/backup vox/handclaps
John Dugan: drums