The Air Conditioned Nightmare

While The Air Conditioned Nightmare represents growth for Doldrums, the caustic and sometimes overwhelming directions the album goes in are more difficult to unravel than the often blissful landscapes laid out in earlier songs. That said, deeper digging reveals Woodhead taking hold of the confusion, conflict, and ugliness of the record and sculpting it into something compelling in a voice all his own.

Nestled in these adrenalised, highly evolved songs are bright pop hooks, showing that other artists could compete with Doldrums, but they wouldn’t be able to keep up.

Like Miller’s series of short stories, this work is no direct condemnation of the diverse Unites States. It’s a series of realizations filtered through an inquisitive, if slightly paranoid, mind. The truths might not be revolutionary, but every generation needs new messengers.

If the poetry of his words doesn’t match the elegance of his music, it doesn’t matter too much; the effect still lands, and Woodhead’s chilling croon over the stormy, volatile electronics he commands speaks more than his words ever could anyway.

It's a tough record to get a handle on, all fidgety switches of tempo and style, but the slippery acid of 'Industry City' and woozy electronica of 'Closer 2 U' reveal the breadth of Woodhead's vision.

The Air Conditioned Nightmare feels like another uncompromising work from the intriguing Woodhead, and in its wide-spanning sound, offers something to both long-time fans and new ones.

On The Air Conditioned Nightmare some of the songs feel reverse-engineered, with vocals serving to glue the songs together rather than providing a focal point in themselves.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is ultimately an experience as disorienting as the sensations and emotions that Woodhead describes, strangely beautiful one minute and aggressively ear-splitting the next.

After a promising start, the LP soon defaults to a brand of quirky, over-stimulated electropop that doesn't really do justice to Woodhead's smart, conceptual lyrics. [May 2015, p.72]

Air Conditioned Nightmare has fewer traces of the experimental Montreal loft party scene Doldrums originally emerged from, but it's not quite accessible enough for big festival stages either.

There are good ideas somewhere inside The Air Conditioned Nightmare, and anyone determined enough to look might get something out of them. Lyrics ranging from naively clichéd to slyly astute.