Weird nightmares, we’ve all had them. Rabid uzi-wielding Teletubbies hunting you down through the jelly swamps of Atlantis on your wedding day while both moons flash like strobes and Enya drums in a Slayer tribute band… or something. Right?
Right. Luckily with his new project Weird Nightmare Metz frontman Alex Edkins opts against a psychedelic black hole of night-time terror, instead dodging his pummelling post-punk day job with ten altogether more ramshackle songs which spit with white-hot joy. Opening track and standard bearer for the album ‘Searching for You’ is a tried-and-tested classic punk formula lovingly delivered with 2022 nostalgia, and there’s a sense of looking back through rose-tinted glasses throughout, in the best possible way. Nothing here is going to challenge you, Weird Nightmare is there to lift you up and on song after song it does just that. Whether drawing on timeless pop hooks on ‘Sunday Driver’ and the pulse-quickening ‘Lusitania’ or sticking a rocket up that light grunge Weezer sound, the first 70% of the album hangs together effortlessly without a care in the world.
The record ends with a hat-trick of plot twists. The spaced-out seven-minute closer ‘Holding Out’ is the pick of them, followed closely by ‘Zebra Dance’, an acoustic instrumental (save for a child’s voice in the background, a nod to Edkins’slockdown home-schooling perhaps?). Sandwiched between these two mellower efforts is the near-Metz explosion of ‘Oh No’, doubtless down to guest Chad VanGaalen wanting in on Edkins’ raucous expertise.
Except with Weird Nightmare the Canadian post-punker raps our knuckles for any pigeonholing that might have gone on – he’s a brilliant songwriter, and we can count ourselves lucky that lockdown gave him the time to go back through nearly a decade of demo tapes and finish some off.
Words - Joe Ponting
Weird Nightmare official