Worth the risk?

I mentioned that I wanted to hear this a couple of months ago and finally, having read some negative reviews and then been unable to source it on vinyl at a sensible price for some time, it arrived yesterday morning. For once I was actually at home when the postman knocked and he asked me, very politely and in a slightly round-about way, what these apparently strange, square, flat, thin packages contained.
I told the truth - a vinyl LP.

Was this LP worth the wait?
Taking risks when buying music unheard is inevitable and not to do so is now unthinkable as far as I'm concerned. It is true that I've bought a few things I don't much care for but that can happen even when one has heard some tracks. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me - it is my only gambling tendency - and I'm winning far more often than losing. Surely most people don't expect to to hear a novel before reading it so why should music be any different?

Well, as I suspected, it is neither nu-miserable nor Black Mountain-lite. In The Future - Black Mountain (2008) is also one of my current 2008 favourites but Lightning Dust is more than likely to also be right up there with the best.
Nothing like the expansive sound of Black Mountain, this is really a late-night, early morning compsition. Keyboards and strings, including cello on several tracks, accompany the lyrics perfectly. Amber Webber wrote them and she sings them too, sometimes accompanied by Joshua Wells, and this is a very different proposition to Black Mountain. If you have 'In The Future' then the best guide is the track Night Walks (see lyrics) as that was written and sung by Webber.
I can't pick any favourite tracks yet and I suspect that it is one of those albums, released in this case by Jagjaguwar, on which I may never be able to do so. It is that good.