Infinite Light

(Release Date: 08/04/09)

From Jagjaguwar:

Infinite Light, Lightning Dust’s sophomore album for Jagjaguwar, finds duo Amber Webber and Joshua Wells (both of Black Mountain) calling upon the powers of classic pop arrangements and making 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.”

“I declare a war on you, someday soon,” Amber Webber warns soon into opener “Antonia Jane.” And damned if she isn’t singing the truth. Following track “I Knew” is absolutely shot out of a cannon, driven by the ping/thud pulse and crusty keyboards of Suicide and taken to flight by the Fleetwood Mac chorus your heart belts on the drive home after that first, anxious make-out session. It’s a blazing, triumph of a song that permanently cauterizes any notion of Lightning Dust as a side project. Later, on “Never Seen,” Lightning Dust stunningly melds mystic, theatrical balladry into a dark, electro “Hounds of Love.”

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.

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
Take It Home

Outside Love

Label: Jagjaguwar

(Release Date: 05/05/09)

“Outside Love” is the third album by Pink Mountaintops (Stephen McBean), who has slowly emerged as a distinctive voice and a very special contributor to the North American songbook. Stephen McBean had contributed to Vancouver/Victorian rock band Black Mountain, as  songwriter, guitarist and co-vocalist.

The ten songs on “Outside Love” are about or influenced by weddings in Montreal, winter, Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut, Christmas albums, that one Exile song and that one Echo and the Bunnymen song, the Bermuda Triangle, being depressed in the sunshine, people who haven’t made out yet but will in the future, The Everly Brothers, clowns in the ceilings, and bedrooms where skinheads used to live.

Friends and family who contributed to or appear on “Outside Love”, in no particular order, include Sophie Trudeau (A Silver Mt. Zion, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Ted Bois (Destroyer), Jesse Sykes (Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, sunnO)))), Phil Wandscher (Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, Whiskeytown), Josh Stevenson (Jackie O Motherfucker), Ashley Webber (The Organ, Bonnie Prince Billy), Amber Webber (Black Mountain, Lightning Dust), Matthew Camirand (Black Mountain, Blood Meridian), Joshua Wells (Black Mountain, Lightning Dust), Keith Parry (Superconductor, the Gay), and Tolan McNeil (Caroline Mark).

Recorded at multiple studios, “Outside Love” was mixed at Elmwood Studios by John Congleton (Modest Mouse, Black Mountain, Explosions In The Sky, The Mountain Goats).

Vampire

While We Were Dreaming

TRACKLISTING:

1. Axis: Thrones Of Love
2. Execution
3. While We Were
Dreaming
4. Vampire
5. Holiday
6. Come Down
7. Outside Love
8. And I Thank You
9. The Gayest Of Sunbeams
10. Closer To Heaven