Lightning Dust Lightning Dust by: Kev Lavery Sun:29-Apr-07 Label: Jagjaguwar Year: 2007 WB rating 87 out of 100

I really wish Glenn Ford was still alive – but not with the problems of conventional aging because he’d be about 90 and of little use to me. I wish that he was alive now, and was somewhere between the ages he was when he made Gilda and The Big Heat. You see, Ford was an actor who starred in numerous film noir movies at the height of this genre’s popularity in the ‘40s and ‘50s. There was always a deep darkness inherent in Ford’s characters; something in the past he could neither escape nor explain. These characters encountered femme fatales, shady individuals, back alley dice games, and the whole gamut of ‘40’s noir. Lightning Dust’s debut reflects this deep darkness, this inability to escape, and these dejected, demoralised characters adrift in a sea of anguish, liquor and beatings.

Lightning Dust’s self-titled album is minimalist to the point of actually being really good (instead of that introspective arts rubbish that is generally associated with music of this nature). It’s haunting, morbidly pleasing, and, basically, really weird. The product of Amber Webber and Joshua Wells side-stepping from their usual positions in Canadian band, Black Mountain (where Webber and Wells sing and play drums, respectively), the Lightning Dust project has outreached its origins; creating profoundly uplifting music.

The sort of minimalism that Lightning Dust employ barely ever works, and if it does it never stands up to three or four listens. Generally this brand of music is very self-important and extremely self-involved; the sparseness in it accentuates the ‘artist’ and their ‘deep’ lyrics. With Lightning Dust, however, each instrument on this album is used, no matter how sparingly, to create beguiling moods that drive the entire album to the zenith of understated despondency.

Lightning Dust overcomes the common trappings of minimalism; succeeding with an album that is concise and melancholically splendid (while not being overly dark), and delicately quirky from the sparse ‘Listened On’ with its bleak sporadic guitar and plummy organ, to the smooth piano ballad ‘Days Go By’ book-ending a richly textured and diverse album.  It is this variety that separates Lightning Dust from the monotony that inflicts many minimalist releases, as the songs sway from incredibly rich soundscapes to the simplicity of single instrument and voice.

Webber is the main vocalist in Lightning Dust and her voice is extraordinary. Her vocals are based in a moderately low register for a female singer and she employs a beautifully restrained vibrato. This is the kind of voice that shapes itself around songs, around instruments, as if it has nothing to prove; as if this range and refusal to suit only one type of music is no effort for Webber. She has just been gifted with an incredibly malleable voice; the kind of voice that can be dictated to by the style of music employed by a particular track and still hold its own.

Every record has that one track that you continue to play again and again. It is the track that you play when you think “I feel like a bit of insert band”; if the album is good, after listening to it you generally end up listening to the entire album. ‘Jump In’ is that kind of song – the prominent piano line actually sounds similar to Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’. Generally when I bring up a point like this it is to ridicule a band for being so out of touch with popular culture as to re-invent a song that was, at best, below-par to begin with; this is not the case here. It’s as if ‘Delilah’ has been rewritten as a morose duet of togetherness until death. The power of the lyrics, “we’ll jump in the lava, it’ll melt us together; hold on!”, and the nature of these two low voices melding together in beautiful harmonies and breaking apart through Webber’s controlled vibrato explores a darkness that wasn’t present when Tom Jones sang over very similar chords. As one of the few instances where Wells is granted a lead vocal, there is almost a sinister sexuality in the song; Webber and Wells sounding like a duo as dynamically potent and sexually charged as Jennifer Charles and Mike Patton on Dan the Automator’s Nathaniel Merriweather presents… Lovage: Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By.

It’s amazing that Webber and Wells can move so far away from their Black Mountain heritage on this record. The duo have spilt a wealth of influences all over this album, ‘Days Go By’ sounding like Nick Drake in a positive, albeit languid, mood; ‘Breathe’ is an organ epic; and ‘Take Me Back’ sounds like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (if it wasn’t self indulgent rubbish). The variation on this record is a strength, able to cover different styles while maintaining the all-important album flow – even a song like ‘Wind Me Up’ (an upbeat, eccentric, pop-ish number) doesn’t feel at all out of place. Lightning Dust is an incredibly concise album especially given that it is the debut side project of a singer and a drummer. I just hope that Black Mountain break up so Webber and Wells can devote themselves to expanding this incredible sound. I also hope Glen Ford is reborn (hopefully at the age of thirty); that’d really make my week.