Album: Lightning Dust, Infinite Light (Jagjaguwar)

Lightning Dust is the side-project of Black Mountain's Amber Webber and Joshua Wells – not that you'd guess it from listening to their second album Infinite Light.

Where Black Mountain were raggedly aggressive, and prone to spiking their chunky metal boogies and stoner psych-rock with squawking free-jazz sax and satanic imagery, Lightning Dust are more restrained and measured, swaddling their electric piano grooves in strings; while Webber's vocals, once Grace Slick-strident, have shrunk to a tremulous warble more akin to Devendra Banhart. But the duo have retained their knack for conjuring a haunting melody, which on tracks such as "Wondering What Everyone Knows" and "Honest Man" recalls the sweetness of such comparable psych-pop outfits as Joy Zipper and Dean & Britta. The album is suffused with a restless instinct to move on. And though restricted, their parameters allow for a similarly restless breadth of approaches: the puttering drum-machine and propulsive synth of "I Knew" resemble Suicide, while the piano and bongo skeleton of "The Times" evokes memories of "Sympathy For The Devil". Most luxuriously, the mellotron-ic strings of "Take It Home" lend the track the sombre depth and futile nobility of a Morricone soundtrack theme.

Download this: 'Take It Home', 'I Knew', 'The Times', 'Honest Man'