The album

The record is held together by a single image: the storm. Call of the Banshee opens with herald-of-anguish wailing and the refrain "it's all broken." Lightnin' turns the storm into something ecstatic - fire, ice water in the veins, wings made of wire - a dance-floor declaration disguised as a weather report. Tsunami takes the same metaphor and pulls it under: we all fall down in the end, just a matter of when, delivered over the kind of bass that makes the title literal. Driving Through a Storm closes the suite with a vocal hook that's just the title repeated until the storm passes - or until it doesn't. Other tracks (Demon Time, We Don't Fear, Unstoppable, Lunar Tide, The Storm Won't Take Me) fill in the rest of the weather report.

The genre tag is "Hard Dance," and the album earns it. The production is unrelenting - fast tempos, big drops, heavy lows - but the songwriting underneath is more careful than the genre usually allows. Every track is a different shade of the same storm, and the album rewards listening front-to-back.

The story

This is the most ambitious Cardinal Lowend record, and the one where the project's appetite for narrative shows up most clearly. Bass music albums rarely commit to a single image this hard. Eye of the Storm does, and it works because the storm metaphor lets the production and the lyric line up - the heavier the drop, the bigger the weather. By the time Driving Through a Storm fades out, you've been through nine versions of the same emotional event, and the project has earned every one of them.

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