It belongs to a different record.Ĭompared with those moments, the rest of The Unnatural World merely suspends tension. 'Unholy Life' has a misleading cadence, as well – it has its own sense of finality, and its own sense of hope. The vocals are eventually lost in the song's tunnel of thick-layered shoegaze, but for a different kind of noise it's a heavenly racket. It opens with the least treated guitar riff in Have a Nice Life's discography before busting out one that skirts into the darker side of Interpol's Turn On The Bright Lights. It's coupled with 'Unholy Life', a surprising burst of euphoria on a record of ascetic terror. Sirens blare through the song before it slows, like the comedown of a heartbeat, into a stony outro. There are only two truly blistering moments, the first being post-punk jam 'Defenstration Song', which brings the band's fear of being followed to life, uniting around the most simplistic lyric they've penned yet: "Get off my back!". The glimpse at the band's eternal misery is minimised, and the vantage point is informed. The Unnatural World runs for forty minutes less than Deathconsciousness did, which makes its descent from Barrett's lonely Connecticut bedroom into the pits of hell less devastating. It's typical Have a Nice Life, something fans will recognise and feel serviced by after the six long years between records, but there's a different quality to it: the gloom is less insistent, and Barrett's steady vocals are impartial amongst the torrential soundscaping. It plummets from its miasmic ambient intro into a hellish slow march much in the way earlier songs did, trapping Barrett and Macuga within their music after a moment of desperate bargaining. 'Guggenheim Wax Museum', The Unnatural World's opener, has many of the band's staples: a derelict lo-fi aesthetic that buries vocals deep at the song's epicentre, drums that sound like scrap metal being dropped from a great height, and wailing reverb piled up like bricks in a prison wall. The genres didn't matter the planet-devouring Deathconsciousness bled bedroom pop into amplifier worship all it liked, but came to be known as a masterpiece of depression.įor scope alone, Deathconsciousness feels important, but it also makes the band's new music sound contented and unfussy. They channelled them through their overwhelmingly heavy, occasionally pretty sound – accurately but unhelpfully labelled "doomgaze", a genre portmanteau used to describe their marrying of metal, industrial, post-rock, drone and shoegaze.
Have a Nice Life were special because of those words, related like solipsism circling blogs. And then there was the record's ultimate mission statement, screamed through hand-clasped mouths: "Why is life so lonely?". "I just don't accept this", uttered inevitably. What stood out instead were the band's miserable, human-scale aphorisms, and how they manifested: "I don't love!", shot in the dark. Most listeners were late game genre-hoppers, oblivious to the record's original minimal pressing. Their debut record, Deathconsciousness, featured a seventy page booklet presenting a character study of the little-known historical figure Antiochus, but like its protagonist, the music's true meaning faded. Despite their high concepts, Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga have always been subject to their inner demons. The Unnatural World makes a subjunctive point: you might die. There probably doesn't, but I've started to believe in one anyway this is a Bedroom Conspiracy Theory at its most convincing, unspecific and so personal in its threat against your life that the words feel suffocating. It's kissed off with eight terrifying words about good old you: "There exists a secret plot to kill you".
#Have a nice life burial society full#
The liner notes of The Unnatural World, Have a Nice Life's second LP, contain a manifesto on the advances of science and the grip of mortality, full of analytical philosophy and post-rock appropriate fear-mongering.
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