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.
But I don't want to sell Infinite Light as an alt-"American Idol" vocal exhibition-- all weird drama, no script. Webber's fever and shy fervor is precisely suited to the album's thematic conceit: the anxiety and streaky joy of new love, which unfolds in a loose narrative you can trace from "I Knew"'s itchy iterations of lust, to the morning-after calm of "Waiting on the Sun to Rise", to "Take It Home"'s melancholy crossroads straddle. And unlike the duo's 2007 self-titled debut, which too often banked on the atmosphere wafting off Well's pulsed organ tones, these songs start with basic pop templates and expand on them with inventive, genre-exploding arrangements. Sure, Webber and Wells make the predictable Cali-canyon and psychedelic space moves you'd expect from people who've worked closely with Stephen McBean, but they call up a range of references-- Krautrock, girl group, piano man, and source du jour, Fleetwood Mac.
According to the players, the five-day loan of a Steinway grand piano inspired this mostly keyboard-driven clutch of spontaneous-sounding tunes. Blues boogie "The Times" finds its capital letter emphasis in the piano's capacity for booming, bounding chords, and "Antonia Jane" deploys the instrument in rolling, arpeggiated waves for the opposite reason-- its knack for sensitive conversational counterpoint. First single and should-be summer mixtape staple "I Knew", however, owes its unexpected electricity to the collision of drum machine, quicksilver organ, dusty guitar, and molasses-mouth vocals, its jittery propulsion reminiscent of Black Mountain's dark odyssey "No Hits". And "Wondering What Everyone Knows", a kind of homage to paranoid doomed-love ballads once emoted by Lesley Gore and Nancy Sinatra, finds delicious melodrama in a wall of histrionic string swells and lumbering drum fills. "Never Seen"'s foggy synthesizers, on the other hand, produce the most characteristic Lightning Dust sound (if such a thing exists among folks this enamored of so many different ones) of trippy hippie mysticism.
I could easily rustle up praise for every track on the album; notwithstanding a title that says too much weed at best and religious cult at worst, Infinite Light is solid. And its overall quality owes more than a small debt to the fact that Webber and Wells have the good taste and modesty to keep it at 10 songs (supporting my long-held conviction, anyway, that if rock bands want to pack more than 10 tracks or 40 minutes of material on an LP, they should have to petition a court first). That said, if these guys happen to have any more casually gorgeous songs like these just lying around, I'd love to hear them.
