Good Vibes

Lightning Dust's Infinite Light

by J. Edward Keyes

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Published: Aug 12, 2009

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There are few sounds in the world as odd and mystical and engaging as Amber Webber's vibrato. Other vocalists use it sparingly, a little weird trick to instill particularly emotive passages with a bit of warp and warble. Webber ladles it on, causing whole verses to quiver. The result is that her songs sound terrifically unbalanced, the kind of incantations the witches in Macbeth might have sung around the cauldron while waiting to tell the good king what he had coming.

Webber, along with fellow Lightning Dust member Joshua Wells, is also in Black Mountain, the Vancouver stoner rock ensemble whose splendid 2008 record In the Future proved above all else that even indie rockers, at one time or another, owned a blacklight poster. Infinite Light is weirder, bolder and more engaging than Webber's going concern. It's tough to pigeonhole — the broad acoustic strumming and lazy, loping melodies should file it as folk music, but the bulk of Light is stranger and moodier than even the oddest Appalachia. "I Knew," the album's finest hour, is a breathless sprint powered by a single staccato organ riff and a thumping bass drum that never relents to the pressure to let other members of the kit — snare, tom, cymbal — join in the fun. Webber's got a thing for restraint: "The Times" is acid-fried and tie-dyed as the best '60s psych, but mercifully concise, and it mostly spurns guitar in favor of burbling organ and banging piano.

Webber's general temperance makes the moments when she does truly go for it that much more rewarding. "History" is Infinite Light's centerpiece, a rousing campfire ballad where organ and guitar and piano form a kind of barroom choir around Webber's nervous croon. It starts quietly, but all parties gain power as the song goes on: The organ swells, the piano kicks out chords as emphatic as exclamation points and Webber muscles her way boldly to the front — every word sounds as Shakespeare, every note quivering and shaking spectacularly.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)

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