A hardcore record is almost always a dress rehearsal, a set of stage directions that prepare the listener for the physical movements they’re expected to undertake when the songs actually come to life at the live show. It’s a means of internalizing the music through repetition until the muscle memory response is effortless and instinctual. And at its best, as on the self-titled release from prodigal Boston hardcore trailblazers American Nightmare, the listener can visualize it in their mind: Here, during this riff, I’ll fling my body just so into the crowd; I’ll shout on this gang vocal prompt. On this breakdown, I’m gonna punch a motherfucker in the teeth.
Fans of American Nightmare have indeed been clenching their fists now for almost 15 years. This record is their first since 2003’s We're Down Til We're Underground, released when the band was known as Give Up the Ghost. After a legal dispute with another American Nightmare, they’ve since reclaimed their name, and reformed their 2004 lineup of guitarist Brian Masek, bassist Josh Holden, frontman Wes Eisold, and drummer Alex Garcia-Rivera. The latter recorded the 19-minute album to 2-inch tape in his Mystic Valley Recording Studio in Boston, where the band traces its roots as an undisputed inductee into the city’s hardcore hall of fame.
Their prior two LPs fit snugly into the archetypical Boston hardcore sound in the tradition of bands like SSD and Ten Yard Fight: each element—vocals, guitars, and drums—coalesces into a singular punishing tumult, then falls out one piece at a time, then comes crashing back together. For American Nightmare, particularly on We’re Down, that formula came with enough moments of musical transcendence that alluded to the band’s self-professed affinity for post-punk, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and The Smiths.
Here there are songs that feel like nods to hardcore tradition intertwined with more melodically expansive diversions. “American Death” is two minutes of riffs and shouting, drum-centric and furious, while “Dream” is a mere 36 seconds of dashed off chaos. Little wonder it’s so short, the intensity would be near physically impossible to maintain much longer. Lead single “The World Is Blue” has it both ways, with relentless snare in a race to the finish all-out sprint, but it’s broken up by introducing hints of disparate song parts: a bass-led breakdown, pulling back the hurtling riff to slower swipes, and the introduction of a lead line that suggests another direction the song might’ve headed were it any longer. “Lower Than Life” still manages to transform halfway through, unclenching like a bloodied fist into a slowed down motif that ends up far from where the song began.
At their best, the band teases at the edges of what hardcore can be, particularly on “War” and “Gloom Forever.” Both songs, standouts here, feature foregrounded guitar leads that provide a musical through-line that hovers over the chaos of the rhythm section below. It’s a fitting tumult for the imagery at work in Eisold’s lyrics, preoccupied with suffering, both bodily and existential in nature. “All my life I’ve dreamed about death,” is the entirety of the lyrics on the quick-hitting “Dream,” but it could pass as a summary of his overarching mindset, with frequent detours into the abyss throughout. “Hell is hot but I'm keeping cool,” he screams on “The World Is Blue.” “I’m in the thorns of the garden with you. I’m in the flames of the fire with you. I’m so alive in the valley of death with you,” he lashes out on “War,” alternating between anger and succor for those who’ve either betrayed him or stood by him.
It’s doesn’t quite have the explicitly new wave-indebted synth punk of Cold Cave—Eisold’s project in the intervening years between American Nightmare records—or the overt romanticism of the Smiths. But the distance between the downright danceable “Gloom Forever” and 1986 song “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” isn’t too far off. The musical flourishes and pitch-black noir that run like a current underneath American Nightmare bring the album into a wider world. Every hardcore record gives you instructions on how to listen to it, the better ones give you something to think about while your body is instinctively preparing for the show.
