Album review: The Nightmares – Fire In Heaven

The Nightmares are a unique troupe of goths. Though their music’s still dripping in darkness and existential, far-reaching conceptualism – no surprise when the album title references a quote from Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman – it’s wrapped up in a different package from what their image might convey.

They trade not in pitch black melodrama necessarily, but in stormy grey gloom – dark in a different, less ostentatious manner. Crucially, it means they’ve struck on something that’s not just intriguing, but refreshingly different.

The Newport quintet’s stylings are maybe not the most immediate, but this isn’t necessarily a fault. It’s careful, however, to ease listeners in with the bewitchingly choppy punk of Siren Song and the eerie Something In The Dark, where screeching synths and rumbling bass twist around the tale of a woman rendered speechless by a supernatural disturbance she cannot explain. Later, it burns slowly but brightly with a gorgeous attention to detail, its rich textures glinting through more with each listen. Letting It All Go’s jaunty rhythms contrast wonderfully with its earnestness, while the pacy Run Away tips its witch hat towards both Matt Skiba and Robert Smith with jangly guitars and atmospheric keys.

Perhaps the real highlight of The Nightmares’ dynamic is the vocal interplay between Adam Parsloe (also on guitar) and Eleanor Coburn (also on keys). He’s in the foreground and her voice cuts through at intervals as if she’s stood like a shadow behind him, suffusing their music with an almost shy sweetness. When she takes centre stage for mid-album ballad Blood On Your Hands, it’s almost disarming, yet effective, hearing her elegant voice condemn the slaughter of animals (and if you’re not vegetarian or vegan, it will really make you think). 'Are you comfortable with what you consume / When someone’s slitting a throat in the next room?' she sings, taking the band’s taste for darkness to a visceral, deeply real place.

Fire In Heaven is an album to sit with, to ponder, to unpick carefully on quiet evenings with single digit temperatures. While The Nightmares are hardly hiding who influenced them, they’ve spun those threads into something distinctive

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Alkaline Trio, Motion City Soundtrack, The Cure

Fire In Heaven is released on February 14 via Venn