Lights’s new album is titled Siberia, and as befits the theme, it finds the warm analog burbles and gentle hum of 2009’s excellent The Listening mostly chilled away, snowed over by a frigid expanse of ice crystal glitches, arctic minimalism and dubby, wobbly avalanches. The sharp stylistic left turn is a bold move for an artist just beginning to establish herself; it’s a shame that it doesn’t work.

Where so much of The Listening’s appeal was wrapped up in its out-of-time mishmash of 1970s and ’80s vintage synth sounds, Siberia is overwhelmingly au courant, firmly rooted in the sound of the now, from the blasts of overdriven bass that open the album on “Siberia” to the peals of digital feedback that close it out. Between and throughout, the dubstep influence is pervasive and overwhelming. It’s a timestamp that may well prove to be an expiration date.

Live-band electronica act Holy Fuck are featured on two songs; individual members share writing credits on two more, and their influence tends to dominate their tracks. The worst of these, “Everybody Breaks A Glass,” is a completely nonsensical corporate clusterfuck, crammed full of deafening fuzzbomb beats, a lame guest rap by the normally impessive and reliable solid Shad, and even a Risecore-worthy wub-wub breakdown. (If glitter is the herpes of the art world, surely the bass drop is the herpes of pop music circa now). It smacks of a focus group gone horribly awry.

Not all of the sonic experiments are failures – the deep subsonic rumble of the title track’s runout, as one example, is more interesting than anything in the preceding four minutes of songcraft. Lead commercial single “Toes,” a gorgeously sly study in forward motion, finds Holy Fuck far less intrusive, to better effect. That said, virtually all of Siberia’s best moments – the tender vulnerability of “Cactus In The Valley,” the warm pulse and perfectly-detuned melodic hook of “Peace Sign,” the Kylie-via-Stacey-Q vocal hook of the chorus in “Suspension,” the dirty robot funk of “Timing Is Everything” — come when Lights abandons glitchery and plays to her strong points as a gifted melodic songwriter.

Still, barring the wonderful four song run from “Timing Is Everything” to “Suspension”, Siberia is full of experiments that just don’t click. And I do mean full — the combined fourteen minutes of the album’s concluding two tracks, the stultifyingly soporific “And Counting” and the lovely-but-trying ambient instrumental “Day One” turn what would already be a lengthy listen into a sort of joyless endurance test. “Where The Fence Is Low” feels like a hook in search of a song, and that hook gets nearly subsumed by wave after woozy wave of low-frequency fuzz. “Banner” bears a too-distinct resemblance to K’naan’s “Waving Flag”, whose rerecording as part of 2010’s Young Artists For Haiti project featured Lights herself. And “Fourth Dimension” plays like, oddly enough, a lesser version of Katy Perry’s “E.T.”

Lights is still young, on only her second full-length album, and it surely behooves her to try on many suits. Unfortunately, it appears the Ice Princess costume was one better left in the closet.

★★.5/★★★★★

*This review was composed by Jesse Richman