Black Mtn. Offshoot Lightning Dust Returns

New album incoming from Jagjaguwar...

By Blurt Staff

Vancouver duo Lightning Dust's sophomore album for Jagjaguwar, Infinite Light (due August 4) is an album that ups the ante of the band's minimalist, self-titled debut and lays to waste any "side project" chatter. As Lightning Dust, Amber Webber and Joshua Wells harness a gentler sound than as founding members of Black Mountain, though this sound is no less loaded with tension and an enviable fluency in the most classic of psych-rock.

For the album, Webber and Wells called upon the powers of classic pop arrangements and made the most of five days with a Steinway Grand piano. While Webber and Wells met through their involvement in what they described as two of the saddest bands in Canada, the songs written for Infinite Light found the two moving away from the uniformly downbeat. Rather, the songs were more suited to lush and melodramatic arrangements. Cue the strings. Lightning Dust have delivered a cosmic record about the adventure in finding love and the journey in losing and rediscovering "the light."

While Infinite Light is definitely more layered and lush than previous efforts, Lightning Dust's minimal aesthetic works well in the economy of musical theater, an influence for the record, wherein each song's movements aim to be more inspiring than the one before it. And this is suiting in that Infinite Light is a nod to "the light of inspiration" that inspires us to keep dancing, creating and loving in spite of an encroaching darkness. It's a reminder that what makes the mountains so very, very black is a distant light somewhere on the other side.

First mp3 "I Knew" is a shining example, an unlikely cross between Suicide  and Fleetwood Mac. Catch a preview here:

"I Knew"

Tracklisting:

Antonia Jane

I Knew

Dreamer

The Times

Never Seen

History 

Honest Man

Waiting On The Sun To Rise

Wondering What Everyone Knows

Taking It Home