Thematically, album has been built on the shoulders of it's, double-in-length, predecessor questions of life and death are still in the air, the colors on the painting of suicide are still fresh, the but the idea of one's nature, determinism and destiny takes a firmer, bolder hold here, hence it's denying and desperate name - The Unnatural World. It gives me chills." tends to be a surprisingly addictive earworm, but it is so with purpose, because, it's an important one. The vanguard song, Guggenheim Wax Museum, breaks the ice in the 36th second with a grandiose effect-driven soundscape, and after that, the record takes a more dancy post-punk pace with Defenestration Song (which is a remake of the original version from the 2010’s Voids cassette). unnatural.ĭeathconsiousness had drowned and suffocated in the distortion and noise of the wall-of-sounds and, from it's corpse, emerged an unresting ghost, which is, The Unnatural World. The same story all over again? It's still melancholic and all, it still respects the "depressive post-industrial doomgaze" traditions, but it feels different, odd, almost. Well, yeah, the faces are still the same: just Dan & Tim, armed with an electric guitar, a bass guitar, a drum machine, a s**ty keyboard from the 80's and an old toy piano Tim found and some other stuff. How does the, oh-so-great, mirror image looks (sounds*) like?
Their relationship is like that of a dead body and a ghost. Welcome to The Unnatural World, the sequel, the mirror album, of the greatest (and the most depressive, yet catharsic) album ever made - Deathconsiousness.
Instead it moves, and moves others with it.Review Summary: The Mirror Album Of The Greatest Album Ever MadeĪnd you are tossed in a bleak ocean of sound, and the blasting reverb-drenched beats of the drum machine are the waves. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Where fellow travelers such as the Soft Moon and Cold Cave religiously exult in the darkwave tradition, Have a Nice Life use The Unnatural World to distance themselves from any kind of retroactive pull. They hover over the rest of the songs like an unspoken, fatalistic threat-an ominous horizon that can’t be escaped from. The album’s matched pair of drumless tracks, “Music Will Untune the Sky” and “Emptiness Will Eat the Witch”, are equal parts brooding interlude and mocking reprieve. Hope, however, is still nowhere in sight. Rather than feeling like morbid exploitation, “Crospey” slowly morphs into a goth-dub uproar that tears loose a heart of tenderness and empathy. Accordingly, the song’s spiraling synths and ghostly wails evoke stolen innocence, nerve-deadened dread, and cries for a rescue that may never come.
“Cropsey”, named after Staten Island’s eerie, mad-slasher urban legend, opens with an even more chilling sample: testimony from a young boy named Johnny, an inmate of the notoriously abusive Pennsylvania mental institution Pennhurst that was featured in the 1968 exposé Suffer the Little Children. When the track’s skeletal tangle of beats and static finally disintegrates, all that’s left is hellish echo.
Hints of shoegaze gauziness and industrial pneumatics float through “Unholy Life”, even as “Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate” bypasses what would appear to be cheeky self-mythology in favor of dour, murky balladry. Smothered in sorrow, “Guggenheim Wax Museum” plods and throbs in time with some cosmic, cancerous organ.
On “Burial Society”, a rolling blackout of congealed noise only barely clothes a sumptuous, lonesome vocal melody-one that’s as full of rage as it is resignation. But instead of sporting the sort of smart-ass song titles found on Deathconsciousness (“Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000”, “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail”), The Unnatural World submerges most of the duo’s bitter irony, or at least the irony, leaving nothing but the bitter.įor all its unrelenting gloom, The Unnatural World oozes beauty. It’s taken six years to issue a proper follow-up, but their central message hasn’t changed: Existence is bleak, gallows humor undergirds it, and sometimes wallowing in that sick paradox is the best revenge. Founded by core members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, Have a Nice Life came on strong with their 2008 debut, Deathconsciousness, then seemed to retreat in the face of an imminent breakthrough.