Enchantment upon first listen to an album is an increasingly rare phenomenon, especially for veteran music critics. But that special feeling hit hard when I heard Lights’ Rites for the first time last year. OMG! competed with WTF? for supremacy in my mind as the disc unfurled its angelic splendors over nine songs that find the golden mean between mid-’70s Fleetwood Mac and Funkadelic. Rites is one of those albums you hear without knowing anything about its creators, but after limited exposure to it, you want to know everything about them. It’s spellbound to happen.
This all-female New York City trio—not to be confused with the Canadian cream-puff vocalist who’s playing Lilith Fair this summer—is the seeming beneficiary of Drag City records’ recent income influx following the breakout success of Joanna Newsom’s Ys. The venerable Chicago label can afford to allow a bit more deviancy into its roster. Lights—Sophia Knapp (guitar, vocals), Linnea Vedder (drummer, vocals), and Alana Amram (bass); Wizard Smoke (wo)mans visuals—formed in the volatile hipster vortex of Brooklyn, but their music sounds totally unconcerned with whatever the blogosphere’s hyping. And, this is important, Lights dress in all white.
“Wearing all white is a transition out of the ordinary,” Knapp says. “You carry yourself differently when you wear all white—you glow more and you also have to be careful to not get the clothes dirty, so you handle yourself with grace.”
That grace definitely carries over into the recording studio. Rites contains a pure outpouring of honeyed, massed vocal harmonies, sinuously sensual bass lines (many conceived by the departed Andy Macleod, including the world-class progression in dance-floor burner “Fire Night”), and heavenly melodies around which one could erect alternative religions. Sporadic psychedelic guitar flare-ups—Hendrix’s Woodstock performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” is a band touchstone—temper the album’s pervasive clear-skies-forever vibes, and “Hold On” even harks back to the no-wave-y tension of Ut, another NYC femme threesome that did some enchanting of its own in the ’80s.
Knapp met Vedder (a distant cousin of Pearl Jam’s Eddie) by chance at an art-supply shop in the East Village; both are visual artists, too, and Knapp and Wizard Smoke attended the same art school. Lights cut a debut album not many people—including me—heard, but it reputedly traded in a less potent strain of folkadelia than can be found on Rites. By all accounts, Rites is where Lights intensified their brilliance.
The group’s lyrics abound in nature imagery (“We Belong” seems to be springing for a “back to the water” movement) and the essentials of human emotions—fairly standard stuff, but they’re dusted with an earnest, wide-eyed mysticism that may give more cynical listeners pause. Unsurprisingly, Knapp cites “Yoko Ono’s fearless attitude” and “campfire rituals at hippie summer camp” as prime artistic inspirations. Lights’ words are sincere, “but they’re also fantastical, romantic, and meant to entertain,” Knapp notes. “We don’t think about the context of our songs historically when we’re writing them, because if you try to listen to every voice, it’s hard to hear yourself think. You’ve just got to go for it.”
The songs’ nature worship and the group’s white attire combine with a deeply devotional feeling in their sound, all of which suggests that music is a spiritual thing for Lights.
“Playing music is spiritual,” Knapp agrees. “It’s a way to connect to your higher self. I think all art forms offer us the chance to access the infinite. I had a dream a week ago where Neil Young said that his goal in life was to ‘annoy the horizon.’ It made me laugh, but it also resonated with me—I’m always searching through music. And my destination is shape-shifting.”
One of Rites‘ highlights is “War Theme,” a coruscating tribal-rock rave-up that ratchets up the intensity to that rivaling Nilsson’s “Jump into the Fire.” Rather than summoning bellicose feelings, the song, says Knapp, “is a chant to drum up courage and feel fierce.
Rites started out as a concept album about war on a distant planet and star-crossed lovers who could contact each other with a crystal rose. Somewhere along the line the story melted away, but the battle theme stuck. The song is an invocation to confront fear.”
Ultimately, Lights’ songs conjure superior fantasy realms bathed in an angelic light and cocooned in sweetness and nurturing warmth. Against great odds, they replenish bitter, jaded hearts with optimism and give one hope for humanity, as illusory as that may sound. But maybe I’m projecting…
“I’m glad our songs make you feel that way,” Knapp says. “[But] I wouldn’t describe our music as escapist. Linnea was abducted by fairies as a child and we tour by Pegasus, so we’re just keeping it real.” 
At first I thought you were writing about this and I was confused:
http://www.myspace.com/lights
These Lights are much brighter, Kevin.
http://www.myspace.com/lightsmakemusic
Yes, indeed.