“Listened On“
from the album Lightning Dust
2007
iTunes
It’s been more than two years since Vancouver’s Black Mountain released their psych rock debut album to much acclaim and subsequently toured the world with the most logical of tourmates, Coldplay, but don’t think that their members have been idle during the band’s downtime.
In the interim, Black Mountain army head soldier Stephen McBean released a second Pink Mountaintops album and Matt Camirand answered with Blood Meridian. Earlier this year, it was time for Amber Webber and Josh Wells to take their turn with their Lightning Dust project.
“It sort of started a couple of years ago when we started recording stuff on to my dinky cassette player just for kicks,” says Wells. “As far as this record goes, we started recording it last summer because we were kind of bored and needed something to do.
“We had no intention to put out a record, really. We had just decided to make it for ourselves.”
While Pink Mountaintops and Blood Meridian are McBean and Camirand’s own projects respectively, Lightning Dust are the first Black Mountain offshoot who combine the efforts of two primary players. Webber and Wells have clearly forged a connection with each other, and it’s fully on display throughout the 10 tracks that make up the Lightning Dust debut. An intimately haunting mix of tear-soaked ballads and folky pop, the album often sounds like a Chan Marshall and Mark Kozelek collaboration, with Stephen Merritt manning the boards.
“We’re definitely really good together,” says Wells of his chemistry with Webber. “I’d say we’re very complementary in the way we write and arrange things together.
“She has definitely more of a natural talent for coming up with a song that’s really haunting, while my talents lie in arrangement and production.”
Webber’s penchant for the melancholy can be found on “When You Go” or “Days Go By,” the latter of which if so rife with yearning and wistfulness that it will have you scrambling for the phone to call that special person who got away.
“I write instrumental music that means nothing basically to people,” says Wells. “It’s like I make these really elaborate backdrops for someone to come in there and be a focal point.
“So I make music with no focus and Amber can just come in and give it focus. And she’s really good at that. There were all these songs that ended up on the record that were all these piano things that I had done and she made them into real songs.”
After writing most of their songs last summer, Webber and Wells began playing a few shows in Vancouver and found the reception favourable beyond their expectations. People began asking them if they planned on recording an album, which wasn’t the original plan, but eventually seemed like a good idea.
“We kind of just took a stab at it and liked how it was turning out,” says Wells. “We played it for a couple of our friends at Jag [Jagjaguwar, Black Mountain’s label], and they got excited about it.”
As for future Lightning Dust plans, Wells admits that it’s a very wait-and-see project. He and Webber were able to focus on it because Black Mountain were hibernating after a whirlwind 2005. The downtime from that gig, however, has ended. The group are touring in advance of their In the Future album, which will arrive in stores on Jan. 21.