Storefront Church
★★★★★
Ink & Oil
HIGH ROOM. DL/LP
LA-based singer-songwriter’s orchestral second album makes its presence felt.
Those who have no taste for drama might eye the music Lukas Frank makes as Storefront Church with suspicion. With fast-flowing orchestral arrangements by Travis Warner adding more volume to songs already brimming over with big feelings, Ink & Oil is an emotional flood of a record, as dark and potent as its title suggests. Frank (the son of Queen’s Gambit director Scott Frank) has previously worked with Phoebe Bridgers, Perfume Genius and Circuit Des Yeux, and while their high-wire emotions vibrate through his songwriting, the Bernard Herrmann apocalypse of Coal or The Manhattan Project’s stringed firestorms show just how far out Frank is prepared to take his music. Too far, maybe, if Words In The Rind or Faith In Oil lulled you into thinking he was simply a doomier Rufus Wainwright. Stick with Ink & Oil, though, and it’s hard not to be swept away.