This fifth album from Vancouver’s post-punk, darkwave, and trip-goth experimentalists, Post Death Soundtrack, is a grand affair in every sense of the word. At 30 tracks, it obviously crams a lot in, in terms of running time, but across these sonically, they explore all parts of the musical map, and not just the regions that most other musicians use to navigate, but also the underside and what lies beyond its borders, as well as beating a path through other hidden charts on which are marked new creative lands and areas marked “here be dragons.”
Opening in the most fractured and subdued fashion, “Tremens” explores altered states of mind, mental health struggles, and life-threatening dependency articulated through a haze of broken sounds before “Good Time Slow Jam (In All My Nightmares I Am Alone) is ushered in to blend crawling nu-metal with the cries of electronic angels. And it is in this song that we see the conflicted nature of the Post Death Soundtrack, as it is a call to hit the dancefloor and have a good time, yet it feels as if we are being sucked down into a hellish dimension.
“Fast Approaching Radiant Light” is sonorous and shattered, yet beautiful in its exploration of musical entropy and decay. It is quite telling that there is a cover of Tom Waits’ “God’s Away on Business” for whilst sonically very different beasts, the two artists do share a love of exploring such dark, funeral subjects and the oft-unexamined side of life…and indeed death…well, given this band’s name that shouldn’t be too unexpected.
There are strange interludes, such as the spoken word, “What’s He Building in There,” floating, folk-infused pieces like “Desert Wind,” and grating, screeching, searing, Nine Inch Nails-esque industrial experimentation on tracks like “Nothing.”
This album was initiated when PDS main man, Stephen Moore, discovered some of his old recordings, sonic sketches spanning everything from industrial and noise rock, to ambient, and acoustic genres, which he reworked and reimagined and, along with numerous new creations and a few well-chosen covers, In All My Nightmares I Am Alone took shape. However, if the album had a varied and eclectic creation process, the songs, although often quite different from one another, come together to form a fantastic sonic narrative that sounds like nothing less than the soundtrack to a full-blown mental breakdown right before the listener. And yet, somehow, for all its darkness and insolation, there is much beguiling beauty and deep reflection to be found here, harsh, challenging and strange though it may be.
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