The anniversary of the debut album from Nightmare Of You came and went without me saying anything, because by the time I realized I should have been saying something about the record, I had already shut down for the year. This record is one of those things that has lingered in the back of my head for the last twenty years, often seeming like a curiosity, but etching the lines deeper with each passing year. Over the last few months, it has been a more important album than it ever has, and to talk properly about it would entail saying things I felt like I was done talking about.
My fascination with the record may have started simply from the band's name, because if there is a recurring truth in my life, it is that there have been several people who could be 'you' who have made me question the difference between a dream and a nightmare. It has not necessarily veered into the philosophical/psychological territory wherein I say that the dream coming true is the worst thing that can possibly happen, and that 'yes' is the worst thing someone can say to me, but it is pulling water from that well.
Next came "Dear Scene, I Wish I Were Deaf", which was a millennial retelling of The Smith's "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out", a song that once carried great meaning to me. When the lyric talks about having "jerked the steering wheel to the median/joking that we'd end out lives/but we weren't joking all the time", it carries a cynically unromantic variation on Morrissey's story about dying with the person you love not being such a bad way to go. Finding something more cynical and morose than Morrissey was interesting, both for realizing the limitations of his contrarianism, but also for understanding the way those thoughts were able to exist in my own head.
"I Want To Be Buried In Your Backyard" is a second chapter to that story, carrying through the ramification of not getting that 'happy ending'. The desire is to remain close even past the end, hoping the pain of being gone can feed a flower to serve as a beautiful reminder of what could have been. I used a different metaphor when I wrote something taking up a similar fear of being forgotten by the people I was stupid enough to care about, but the sentiment was similar. There is something uniquely painful about throwing your entire weight into something, only to realize you could not make someone's heart budge in the slightest.
I've been thinking bout this record for that very reason. Lately, I've been as detached and cynical as the characters in these songs, but for very different reasons. When the opening song sings, "if it feels like your heart's dried up, I can relate to that/and if you need someone at your side, I am out there", I hear the words in my own voice. It makes me wonder if it's possible for love to be classified as a long-term heart attack, given the damage both are capable of causing. That's the appropriate level of cynicism when listening to Nightmare Of You.
I could pick a few more lines to illustrate the connection, like when it is sung, "I scoured your town completely aroused, making love to your memory", but I think I've made the point enough. This record is a collection of sad and macabre stories on how love and connections are various shades of horror movies, but for some of us it gets even more cynical than that. The psychological abuse done is not shameful for the effect it has had on us, but shameful instead because it is the strongest desire we have. We want to suffer through that, because at least that means we had the experiences of life at all. When the lyric says, "I do want to fall in love, but I just don't know how to", it is absolutely something I have said to myself.
That isn't to say this album speaks to me like a kindred spirit, because there is a sense of irony baked into them that is very much a performance, whereas my feelings are all too real. No, the reason the record has continued to resonate with me is because I find it cruelly amusing that it took cynical fiction for an album to capture my own feelings. If we use stories and parables as ways of sifting down to the truth, there aren't many sieves fine enough to let such faint light fall through.
It's a story of inertia, and how a record can move closer slow enough to not notice the collision course until it's too late.
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