“Nightmares” is a tender and small song on a turbulent record.
“I watched the monsters drag their shadows / across the street and straight inside,” Brody Price sings over fingerpicked guitar. It’s the midway point of the Dallas songwriter’s new Leaf Miner’s Daughter. The feedback and distortion are momentarily quiet, and Price is alone with his demons. “The world will let you down,” he intones. “I might stick around.”
Especially in the 20th century, there was a noxious symbiosis between rock music and addiction. Alcohol and drugs were broadly presented as the perks of a life of late nights and electric guitars, not the cost. Yet it wasn’t sexy from within. “I can feel the wheel, but I can’t steer,” as Layne Staley described addiction in a 1992 Alice in Chains song. The now-sober Price wrote Leaf Miner’s Daughter from within the storm of his own alcoholism. The songs are rich with pain, desperation, and regret. This is damaged and raw rock and roll songcraft in the vein of Patti Smith, Mark Lanegan and Iggy Pop. The record is sludgy in spots and abrasive in others, the songs from Price’s ordeal grounded in heavy distortion and lined in sharp angles.
