Home Read Classic Album Review: Storm & Stress | Under Thunder & Fluorescent Light

Classic Album Review: Storm & Stress | Under Thunder & Fluorescent Light

This came out in 2000 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):

 


Two-thirds of New York/Chicago trio Storm and Stress (English for sturm und drang) are also in instrumental futurist fusionists Don Caballero.

Not surprisingly, S&S prowl a musical netherwold similar to that of Don Cab; a place where surging indie-rock energy meets freewheeling free-jazz eccentricity. But they do it without DC‘s forays into thrash-metal thunder and proggy noise-rock. Instead, Stanley Jordanesque guitarist Ian Williams, crash ‘n’ bash drummer Kevin Shea and bassist Erich Emm take a more spacious and delicate approach to their mostly instrumental works, savouring and kneading the emptiness between the notes as purposefully as the music itself. Theirs is a world of texture and subtlety over structure and velocity. They may call their intentionally improvised style “purposeful forgetfulness,” but it produces some memorable musical results.