By Mike McGuirk

A COUPLE YEARS ago, as I was falling into an abyss of depression, I spent a long weekend alone in my room with a DVD of The Bridge on the River Kwai that was packed with a documentary, interviews, a commentary track, and the movie itself, which is about nine hours long. I watched the entire thing three times through, successfully numbing my mind for 72 straight hours. For a while I just put the part where the train goes off the bridge on a loop and watched that until my eyes hurt. This is what DVDs do best: they're a good substitute for hard drugs, to blow a weekend straight to hell, a means for getting a better perspective.

Lightning Bolt, The Power of Salad and Milkshakes (Load) Lightning Bolt, the power-panic bass-and-drum combo that have ripped the top off the mathematical, feedback classic-rock deconstructionist-art hardcore movement, offers The Power of Salad and Milkshakes, a DVD chronicling their 2001 tour. The whole noisy, insolent, artsy-fartsy crowd – the so-called freak rock underground – of which L.B. is, to quote a friend, "the crowning instrument of destruction," is, like, five seconds away from going global, and believe me, the 5,000 kids who show up at their shows with the sole intention of going bananas can't be wrong. The Power of Salad in no way corroborates my theory, but that's not important; what's important is that this is a sound purchase, if not an essential one.

For one thing, if you were at any of their shows here two years ago, you're probably in it. For another, it's interesting to watch the effect amplifiers stacked to the ceiling, horrendous volumes, and a drummer who defies the laws of physics have on audiences throughout the country. Lightning Bolt are the sound of power, of an open current, and when you expose that sound to a room full of people, you get a violent, cathartic reaction. This is a band that superlatives are made for, and I tend to wet my pants every time I try to write about them, but what are you going to do? I love Lightning Bolt. They combine heaviness, chaos, order, and instrumental mastery to an awesome degree.

The film also features plenty of funny and warm interviews and shows them playing with cats. You have to see it if only for the guy in Texas who has the best Afro ever and is clearly tripping his balls off. On top of the hour-plus documentary, you get some hilarious rehearsal footage and a pair of cartoons that are designed to split your brain down the middle, one by cut-and-paste genius Paper Rad of the Dearraindrop art collective: teenage kids who spend all their time dredging up memories of their childhood and making them even fucking weirder. This is the best band in America (besides Bruce Springsteen, of course), and while the DVD doesn't give you the whole sweaty, human crush of their live show, it's still a better product than almost anything in any music store anywhere, unless it's a new Springsteen album about 9/11.

Friends Forever, Friends Forever (Plexifilm) This bona fide (they played it on TV) documentary chronicles the perpetual tour this unspeakably great and unpredictable band is currently on. Friends Forever are two dudes, Josh and Nate, of questionable musical abilities who drive around the country playing shows from inside their van. They pull up outside a venue, turn on a smoke machine, fire up the laser show, and as the drummer flips out in the back, the guitar player falls out the passenger-side window, guitar in hand.

The movie shows them living in truly disgusting conditions with two dogs and fellow freak-scene members and drinking their own vomit, offering monologues about how they are on a mission from God (to save rock 'n' roll), and traveling all the way to Troma's film studios (a big influence) in New York City to be honored by their heroes, only to be misbilled as another band from their hometown. Another great scene is watching the drummer's father try to comprehend what the hell is happening with his son.

Apart from the obvious merits the movie has for fans of the band, Friends Forever is also a pretty effective way to introduce people to an underground world, as it captures the freedom and chaos of warehouse shows, the close-knit, communal atmosphere of the scene, and the way these people live on no money at all, ever – it's crazy. The movie was made two years ago and has been making the rounds at indie film festivals since – catch it! No, the point is the movie translates to all sorts of people: you don't have to be a hipster to get it. The best part is that Nate and Josh think it portrays them as "too serious."

Wolf Eyes, Covered in Bugs (Hanson) Wolf Eyes have ruined me for live music. Since the last tour when they came through here and a show I saw in Detroit this summer, I just don't want to go see a band unless they're going to obliterate my notions of music the way Wolf Eyes have done. The three players – Nate Young, John Olson, and Aaron Dilloway – work three sets of homemade, electronic gadget noisemakers. As one guy makes a sound, it's run through the setup of one of the others and manipulated, then sent to the third guy to be fucked with even more. So by the time the signal reaches your ears, it's already been tampered with twice. No one's music comes through the speakers with a sound that is any one member's own. Then there is the most minimal, simplistic beat underneath – or over the top of – it.

Describing this music is a waste of time; you have to witness it unfolding in front of you, to feel the animal in it. In fact, you need to see the band, like, three times before your mind is ready to accept the new vocabulary these evil bastards are spitting out. I've said this a thousand times here already, but Wolf Eyes are changing music, and they've been the only ones to do that in a long, long time. The Wolf Eyes DVD, Covered in Bugs, for this reason alone, is worth checking out. Made up of two parts, the more than two hours of material includes an entire show in Chicago, a montage of footage from live shows and parties, and a section in which they're driving around in a van. The material goes back as far as 2000. There's footage of Olson jamming with either his mom or his aunt, where he makes these fucked-up noises and she plucks a balalaika or something, with super-slo-mo effects all over the film. It's cool because you get a sense that maybe these dudes aren't necessarily the agents of Satan and that maybe they're just from a long line of people who are into the idea of musical revolution.

The show in Chicago starts with the usual 10-minute buildup, where it seems like they're having some kind of technical difficulty, or just doing a sound check, and then suddenly it all goes haywire, with Olson pumping his fists and Young doing his head-shaking rain-dance thing. Young is the best vocalist in music today. His screams are just real, and lyrics like "I'm gonna burn your house down" take on this weird funny-but-kind-of-scary feel. The last song they play is the one that's going scare the pants off you. Wolf Eyes might be joking around a bit with this menacing thing, and really it may all be about partying, but an undercurrent of dark, dark shit is there. The music sounds like pure evil. There's just no other way to describe it. If you were trapped in that house in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this is probably what you would hear.