09/06/23
Amber Vinyl
In 2019, Lightning Dust broke up. Not the band, but Amber Webber and Joshua Wells the couple at the core of it ended their longtime relationship. In the wake of the split, the two musicians realized that Lightning Dust was still important to them and decided to stay together as an artistic partnership. The experience made them think about nostalgia as a concept and how this sort of longing for the past can be destructive, cancerous, useless. Webber and Wells reconvened virtually in mid-2020 to work together again as creative comrades, sharing some new ideas by correspondence, stitching together their song fragments into the dramatic arrangements now heard across Lightning Dust’s new album, Nostalgia Killer.
The album title couldn’t set a more perfect expectation for what the album holds.
Hearing those words together, one might anticipate something harder, more chilly and severe. But what happens is quite the opposite: listeners find themselves wandering into someplace warm, guided by familiar sounds and voices.
Little do they know they’ll soon be flung into a climate unknown. Throw away the old coat–these songs signal a new season. This is a winding and moving album. Sensual, confessional, and free of fences. Each song builds with inexorable force, often pulling back to a whisper before washing over the listener completely. With their wealth of new imagery and the most incandescent flights, Lightning Dust sweeps you away from wherever you happen to be.
Across Nostalgia Killer, Lighting Dust introduces a sound that feels vaguely familiar while forming a mythology all of their own. Although this exact work may not have been created if it wasn’t for the duo’s separation, it would be wrong to simply call it a break-up album. The songs here don’t merely travel that well-trod
landscape, they reinvent the scene altogether; after all, sometimes love needs reinventing. Nostalgia Killer is about something that affects us all, which is how we make sense of the world and each other over time and across borders. And far out as always, Lightning Dust is reinvented here magnificently.
