Nowadays it seems as if new bands are appearing all over the place these days in today's music industry. Sometimes you have big build ups and announcements teasing you for either new music or new bands/projects and sometimes bands will just pop up right the hell out of nowhere and take you by surprise. If say this new band was the latter, how would you feel about giving their songs a try, even if there was no build up, announcements or teasers for them? This is a practice we will put into place for a band that popped up right the hell out of nowhere in the past several months and their name is LIGHTNING RULES.

Formed only just recently, LIGHTNING RULES are a three piece Heavy Rock band from Portland, Oregon who all seem to go by mysterious names with their members and judging from the paper bearded bags on their heads in their first public release of a video, a weird choice of attire too. If that gives you reason to worry then don't as there is a reason to not worry which I'll get to a bit later but onto the main topic of this review which is the band's debut self-titled EP. Clocking it at around 17 minutes across 5 songs, the debut self titled EP from LIGHTNING RULES, well, rules. That sounds a bit of a weird way to describe it but there is reasoning behind it as the music on this EP is actually surprisingly enjoyable. Even though they may have only been made known very recently, the songs they give us are actually very like-able as all five songs on their debut EP are all enjoyable slices of Heavy Rock.

Starting off with "Corsicana 1984", this song alone gives you a taster of what this band are all about as it has heavy but dirty sounding guitars, drums that sound deep and bass-y and a vocal performance which is very good as it sounds just right for a song of this caliber/musical style as do the guitars and drums. The next song "Pull Me From Hell", seems to follow the same formula but with a slightly clearer sound, making everything sound just a little bit more heavier then the first track, which is by no means bad as it is very enjoyable, but the extra clarity on this track makes you like the bands sound even more.

The third and fourth songs "Degrees And Separation" and "In Spades" seem to be the heaviest songs on this EP. Both seems to take their cues from both Hard Rock & Heavy Metal with their guitar melodies, drum beats and also the vocals too and both songs sound heavy as hell together but that is by no means bad as the band give it their best to deliver a punchy and powerful performance and deliver they do as both songs are enjoyable. The final song on the EP "A Collapse" takes a little bit of the styles used on the previous four songs and combines them into one with elements of Heavy Rock, Hard Rock & Heavy Metal all rolled into one to create an enjoyable closing song that has heavy dirty sounding guitar riffs, pounding drum beats and a vocal performance that is good.

I've pretty much summed up what this EP sounds like with the descriptions of the songs but I'll add on a few more little details. I'll start with the production which has actually been done very well for a release of this type and the mixing & production techniques used on all five songs work together well to accommodate each songs sound. If I did have one complaint about this EP, is that at times it can be hard to make out the lyrics sometimes, as in places the vocals get a little buried underneath the guitars, but fortunately there is plenty of punch and oomph in the performance to make up for it so it's not really that big of a problem.

Bottom line, the debut self-titled EP from LIGHTNING RULES is five enjoyable slices of Heavy Rock with some elements of Hard Rock & Heavy Metal thrown in too. The end result is an EP from a band who despite only revealing themselves to the world very recently, are capable of creating some very enjoyable songs and that is present on this EP, which I recommend you give a listen if you're looking for something that sounds unique but good.<