Thunder Dreamer - Capture

Pitchfork 77

Evansville, Ind. is the Hoosier State’s third-biggest city, but its metro area spills over into southern Illinois and northern Kentucky, making for a jumbled geographic identity. Compared to its surroundings, Evansville is an urban hub, but its economy has traditionally thrived on shipbuilding and refrigerators, symbols of erstwhile American greatness. Evansville is a unique corridor between the Rust Belt and the south; it voted Trump by a wide margin. “Everything seems to die here... People get discouraged and stop trying,” said Thunder Dreamer drummer Corey Greenfield in a recent interview, reflecting on a city that’s so quintessentially American, it can seem invisible at times. With this in mind, it’s easy to see why a young rock band would have broken up with Evansville. Some of Thunder Dreamer did just that. But Capture is all the more powerful as a story of their eventual reconciliation.

Whatever Evansville lacks in industry infrastructure, it’s clearly been a tremendous incubator for a band looking to avoid the sonic hivemind of a scene. Capture echoes geographically-evocative artists from its Midwest surroundings while maintaining a singular center. Within Thunder Dreamer’s sound are the fidgety dashboard confessionals of Boys Life’s road-trip cult classic Departures and Landfalls; the mesmeric stoner emo of their northwest neighbors in Cloakroom; and early Mark Kozelek, Jason Molina, and My Morning Jacket, with the latter stepping outside the grain silo to take in the boundless vistas.

Thunder Dreamer have embraced “Midwestern” as a descriptor, identifying with its underlying humility and landlocked yearning. The bands they recall made grand, expansive, sprawling music that no one would call grandiose or epic. Most of the eight songs on Capture push towards five minutes and beyond with post-rock patience and the force of pop. They take after the landscape with slow, sloping escalations towards welcome pockets of bustle rather than relying on codified crescendo-and-crash dynamics; it’s less Explosions in the Sky than slow-burning bonfires in a secluded rural clearing. The songs are all given proper heft through analog production, capturing firefly flickers of guitar, misty reverb, and crackles of heat lightning to create an overall ambience of an overcast July night. It’s a summer album for the way most experience it outside of the coasts: a thick, palpable atmosphere that feels enveloping rather than oppressive and a dusk that seems to last infinitely.

Singer Steven Hamilton has noted that bands in Evansville actually do a disservice to themselves if they play too many local live shows. So while Capture is a traditional rock record, it lacks that dynamic of crowd-sourced pressure. Thunder Dreamer benefit from this in ways, though: “St-Malo” juxtaposes calm and claustrophobia, appropriating the walled-in, battle-torn beauty of its namesake, while the brisk and chiming single “You Know Me” has an unusually developed musculature for dream pop. Still, Capture’s standout quality is Hamilton’s forthright and crystalline vocals, a surprising contrast when “heartland rock” typically evokes the realm of mutters and drawls. It’s not slick by any means, but Hamilton lends Capture an alluring elegance, particularly on the luxurious mope of the title track. At points, it does slightly resemble their heroes in Mock Orange, the only band of note to previously arise out of Evansville and also one that rarely toured and never settled on a specific sound.

Hamilton’s voice is an effective instrument for what he calls “sad words to fit sad notes.” And whether he’s delivering plainspoken, classic emo heartbreak (“Why Bother”) or local xenophobia against refugees (“Living Like the Rest”), it’s never heavy-handed. However, Hamilton admits lyrics sometimes came at the last minute, and there’s certainly a discrepancy between them and the group’s painstakingly crafted instrumentals. But Capture benefits from its reliance on ambience for evocation. It’s a record of young men learning to live with the implacable fear emanating from the crossroads of America, rather than running from it.