Post Death Soundtrack’s latest offering, “In All My Nightmares I Am Alone,” arrived not so much as a collection of songs, but as a psychic weather event. Listening to Stephen Moore’s solo excursion is like being invited to a wake where the dearly departed is, perhaps, oneself, or maybe just the idea of a stable Tuesday afternoon. It’s a dense, prickly thing, this record. One minute you’re navigating what feels like the ghost of a factory floor after a particularly metallic argument (hello, Skinny Puppy’s spectral cousin); the next, a lone guitar picks its way through the wreckage – as if a fragment of Nick Drake’s sorrow found a new, harsher soil to bloom in.
The album wears its heart, or rather, its exposed nerve endings, on its sleeve. Moore apparently wrestled with delirium tremens while birthing one of these tracks, and honestly, you can almost smell the stale fear and fluorescent-light sweat baked into certain moments. It’s not comfortable. Not always. There’s this sense of insidious forces ‘sneaking their essence,’ a line that made me suddenly recall the peculiar, almost imperceptible hum of old, malfunctioning streetlights, that subtle disquiet that tells you something’s off, even if you can’t quite name it.
The lyrical terrain is a map of psychic fissures – disillusionment so profound it feels like gravity itself is failing. And yet, amidst the articulated terror and the ‘complete breakdown in audio format’ (a refreshingly candid self-assessment, that), there’s this raw, almost brutal, push for… something else. Not hope, necessarily. More like the desperate muscle-twitch of a thing pinned down, fighting for the space to simply be, even if ‘being’ means embracing a more jagged, uncomfortable self. The eclectic genre-hopping, from industrial clang to folk’s fragile bones, isn’t jarring; it feels like the necessary sound of a mind trying every door in a burning house.
‘In All My Nightmares I Am Alone’ isn’t background music for your polite dinner party, unless your dinner party is themed around the quiet erosion of everything. It’s a challenging, occasionally harrowing listen, yes, but there’s a strange solace in its unvarnished honesty. It crawls under your skin and stays, less like an itch and more like a newly discovered nerve, raw but undeniably alive. When the world feels tuned to a distorted frequency, what else can one do but attempt to find the melody within the static?
