Storm And Stress
Under Thunder And Fluorescent Light

A bit of history. In 1993, Ian Williams, Damon Che, Pat Morris, and Mike Banfield formed Don Caballero. It was a project aimed at creating a type of music that the four would call "math rock". Songs structured in a rigid form, with dominant guitar and drums, brisk and sharp rhythms, an absolute prohibition on any virtuosity or solo ambitions. Everything must sound compact and unassailable. The first album is exactly like that, compact, and in many parts it reveals metal sound influences (like Kyuss: but that's a stretch). There's the impression that nothing else can be added to the songs. They are dense. Perfect. The band thus forms as a programmatic manifesto.

Years and albums pass. Don Caballero becomes increasingly ethereal, once compact chords and structures begin to loosen. But it’s not a decline, quite the opposite. The last album by Don sounds like something "unfastened". The guitars have lost the tuning and the strings, the songs unfold in a skewed and visionary manner with many changes. Don Caballero, however, still manages to maintain a straight course. It passes the roadside white line test. The latest Don Caballero is a drunken progressive rock played by painters. There they are, damn it. They have become painters. It's the last album (American Don). Ian Williams (guitar), Damon Che (drums), and Erich Topolski (who will take the pseudonym Eric Emm of Storm, on bass) form Storm And Stress. Everything is destroyed. A Don Caballero album was titled "What Burns Never Returns". It wasn't a lie. Don Caballero disbanded, and only Storm And Stress remains. Evolved fruit. Alien mineral. Once again, everything changes. Ian Williams is a scholar, and he is completely out of his mind. Storm And Stress were born with the intent: "forget the songs while playing them".

The first album (self-titled) of Storm dates from 1997. A damn impressive free-jazz work with hyper-agitated drums and guitar and bass (and for the first time voice) that "make and forget the song while playing it". Complete freedom. Bottles breaking. Strings snapping. Beautiful, absurd, desperately and perfectly sinusoidal songs. The singing intones hallucinated and enlightened verses like We'd like to fell but have no feelings left. Molecules of a feverish structure that stirs and calms beneath our ears and our stunned brains. The songs have an average duration of 11 minutes. Of this album, I own a double version (compact and double vinyl). The reader should trust: if you want to hear something truly enlightening and lively in the contemporary rock scene, go and buy both this and the one reviewed here.

Three years later, Storm And Stress released Under Thunder And Fluorescent Light. A masterpiece. The music further enriches itself. Modified drummophone DNA inserts are added to the creation/evolution (dis)continuous and skewed and (dis)sectioned structures. Decipherable yet indistinct intentions, but it's all fucking clear. Crystal (in the sense of a lens). These people knew and know their stuff and have even grown. "Grown" damn it. A term that, referring to Williams (the all-encompassing mind of the group), sounds like a disgusting insult. The album is produced (I believe, I don’t remember and don't feel like checking) by Jim O'Rourke, who (I believe, same as above) also plays drums on one song. This time they seem more calculated, more "songs" (if you can call them that). But it isn’t true. Nothing here is true. Every microatom of this album is relative. Relative to what. . . (?) relative to all the rock that has been made and played so far. Everything, damn it. Everything reconsidered, poured into a particle accelerator, atomized, and then poured (still vivid and reduced to pure "pure thing") onto a steel table to be analyzed by this team of scientists. And out of the analysis and recomposition comes this damn Byzantine mosaic.

Now Storm And Stress have disbanded. Like Don Caballero. The big bang has stopped. It is very likely that nothing more will come out under the Storm And Stress name. I'm sorry. I know. Everyone is sorry. I'm sorry too. But they were too much of geniuses (genius, not just brilliant) to remain cohesive. The world of music also consists of things we cannot understand. But something truly alive is stirring in my player. And I can say I feel fulfilled.