Album Review: Infinite Light by Lightning Dust

Compared to the duo that made their debut back in 2007, the Lightning Dust of 2009's Infinite Light sound just a touch gentler, more meditative, and smoothed out around the edges. Their sophomore full-length is full of sleek string arrangements (especially on "Dreamer") and graced with a heavy handful of computerized drumbeats and reverb effects; in other words, it's just as stark and strange as the duo's debut, only more elegantly dressed. Lightning Dust also sound quite a bit like the Handsome Furs on this release -- something that can be chalked up to a combination of gritty synthesizers, oily drum machines, and lead singer Amber Webber's hungry croon.

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Quick plug for one of the great lost albums of the decade: I first heard Amber Webber singing on Early Day Miners’ Offshore (2006). For almost ten years, Early Day Miners have been operating at the intersection of slowcore and post-rock, whilst singing the American environment – natural, built, and often broken – into being. On ‘Return Of The Native’, Amber sings a series of haiku-like sketches in a haunted, tremulous voice that put her in a league with Gillian Welch or Emmylou Harris, but also has enough mystery (what put the cracks into that young voice?) to recall the unknown “Nancy” from Jandek’s early records.

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Amber Webber's broken-warbled vibrato is thick and sour-sweet like buttermilk, wobbly as a warped record, bumpy as the soft-hard ridges of a curved spine. The Vancouver singer/multi-instrumentalist who sidelines as Lightning Dust with fellow Black Mountaineer Joshua Wells, lends single-slug words "hand" and "sea" a dozen extra syllables and a line like "this city is in a panic" a waving-or-drowning inscrutability. Throughout Lightning Dust's second LP, Infinite Light, Webber's on the verge of tears-- or laughter, depending on how her voice finds you-- and her raw emotion makes for one of the fiercest, most stirring vocal performances of any release this year.

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Fact: there are enough Black Mountain side projects to make Black Mountain seem like a side project. Other fact: said side projects are consistently worthwhile..

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In a year swarming with disappointments, tumbling from the breathlessly hyped box of new releases, it’s a relief to report that the sophomore effort from Black Mountain cohorts Lightning Dust is a refreshing follow-up to their satisfying debut. Although hardly a ground-breaking record by any means—lacking any real claim to reinvention in the crowded indie rock world of the 2000s—it’s a sturdy building block on their previous outing, gliding gently from sighing stringed ballads and swirling acid-laced pysch folk to tip-tapping mid-tempo strollers and haunting dirges bound by airy drums and eerie keyboards without missing a beat. Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, the two masterminds behind the dusty, spindly sounds of Lightning Dust, find a quietly enticing niche, protruding outside of the confines of their meeting grounds in Black Mountain.

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Tremulous opener "Antonia Jane" glints enough Mazzy Star to prompt moon shades, but Amber Webber's reedier voxcraft reverbs tougher stuff. Paired with Black Mountain bandmate Josh Wells, the singer brings a subtle undercurrent of the duo's Canadian psych-roots quintet, even though as Lightning Dust, she and him recall a Mazzier She & Him. Webber's pop noir delivery sprinkles 4AD, but she's quietly feral, as if Sinead O'Connor sang with the temerity of Daniel Johnston.

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