With some musicians, you can tell immediately if they're in the same room as a guitar. Yeah, I'm talking about Ian Williams. His burbling, twangy chimes are light, yet brutally repetitive, almost to the point of obsessive-compulsiveness. While he's developed his style to sound like he's absentmindedly plucking, he's also intensely focused on running through every possible permutation of how his three-note riffs can be played. Williams has obviously been damaged by years of avant experimentation, yet his playing seems to be less about smashing the tyranny of the twelve-tone scale and more about actual melody-- albeit melody that's played backwards and at the wrong speed.

Of course, Ian's already made big waves in the national indie rock scene as part of the avant-instrumental-metal juggernaut Don Caballero. But Storm and Stress sounds like a more distilled version of his playing, focusing more on its droning, deconstructionist aspects. With drummer Kevin Shea pulling out all the jazz-drummer clichés and pummeling them with gentle, loving fists, and bassist Erich Emm practically disappearing in Williams' shadow, Storm and Stress comes on like the Shaggs reflected through the prism of the hipster intellectual.

The band's sloppy, almost primitivist innocence is backlit by the poetic pretension of titles like "It Takes a Million Years to Become Diamonds So Let's Burn like Coal until the Sky's Black" (not to mention the name of the band itself, a reference to the German literary movement Sturm und Drang). But whatever their motives, Storm and Stress have made a surprisingly listenable album that's less rooted in the structure of music than in the enjoyment of pure sound.

Like its odd minimalist packaging, Under Thunder and Fluorescent Light sounds almost translucent, like the sound water molecules make when they collide with and cling to each other as they tumble from a faucet. Even when the drums skitter and crash against the warping wood of the guitars, there's a sweet dreaminess to the whole affair. This could be thanks to producer Jim O'Rourke, whose current orch-pop fetish may have helped prevent things from getting too harsh. But is O'Rourke also responsible for that bit of tape-manipulation magic that recalls his earlier work with Gastr del Sol and Brise-Glace?

While Under Thunder and Fluorescent Light bears an uncomfortable resemblance at times to Joan of Arc (especially when Ian Williams sings), don't take that the wrong way. Storm and Stress is the band that Joan of Arc wish they could be: the pretension is built upon the band's talent and musical curiosity, not the other way around. It's soothing, nightmarish, confusing, upfront. And the last track, "Forever, Like Anti-oxidants (Listen to the Sounds Our Cells Make)" even comes with its own built-in commentary:

"Hello?"

"Yeah, look. It's more honest this way. Innocence doesn't last forever. The confusion is gone; it's more... rational."

"Yeah, but it plays like a blacked-out movie."

"Heh heh! Exactly! It's like a book without words. What I think we gotta do, though, is [unintelligible]..."

"Hello?"

[unintelligible]

"You're breaking up. I can't hear you."

-Nick Mirov