3 out of 5

Label: Touch and Go

Produced by: Jim O’Rourke

Longer song titles, creative packaging, and a switch from Albini to O’Rourke on production: this all tracks.

Storm&Stress’ first, self-titled album is surely an acquired taste, and then it’s also one of the most brilliantly brittle art-rock jams of all time, anti-whatever you were expecting of a Don Cab splinter, but perfectly musical and memorable once you gave it time to work its magic; it’s exactly the kind of disc that maybe seems relatively impenetrable at first, but opens up the more you spin it.

With a group like this – one very much going against the grain – it’s inevitable that a followup album is hard-pressed to find a balance of “more of the same” and “different.” Perhaps logically, the group chose to disassemble their scattered sound of pit-a-pat drums and tip-a-tap guitar and sputtered bass notes even more, and there’s definitely a version of that first experience again found here: a lack of structure gains structure the more you go through the disc. However, Under Thunder oddly feels less challenging in a way, even though you could say Storm&Stress has pushed the musicality even further to the borders of the album. It’s only towards the disc’s concluding two tracks that we get a “break” resembling something like the distorted punctuations on the previous disc, though here it’s presented more by the guitars and drumming aligning, and not so much as an increase in volume or pace. This is a very worthwhile peak, which isn’t to say that what’s come before isn’t worthwhile, but whenever I get to that point on this album, it definitely makes me wish that we had more of that across its 40 minutes. Elsewhere, tracks don’t congeal into songs, but rather pieces of them, drifting into one another. I really like some of the subtle touches – the vague feedback or perhaps tape manipulations that give the minimalism shape – but even that doesn’t feel pushed quite enough to make it more immersive. It’s less challenging because this all feels closer to an improv jazz session, with Kevin Shea’s drums more frequently representing a rolling style befitting that tag, and Ian Williams’ guitar very, very close to the chill prettiness that was frequent on American Don, but without any hooks. Erich Emm’s bass still adds a nice contrast, but under O’Rourke’s hand, that’s very much smoothed out – the change in producers is perhaps the most telling element, as we get much, much closer to jam than post-rock here.

I can’t say another experience like the first album would’ve seemed “right,” and the general direction of Under Thunder & Fluorescent Lights is righter than it’s wrong, but the majority of it ends up sounding like the warmup for an album that could’ve been, and also maybe sounds similar enough to some other improv stuff out there to make it less essential than before. I still visit this on occasion, especially to appreciate the overall journey to some excellent final tracks, but, to me, it doesn’t leave a lasting impact.