Deathconsciousness - Have A Nice Life
Have A Nice Life’s debut album Deathconsciousness – as the title suggests – is an album obsessed with death. The cover, the 1793 painting ‘The Death of Marat’ - depicting the titular french poet’s body in a bathtub - makes this clear before it even begins. The two band members, Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, painstakingly forged a world around the album, including a 70 page booklet accompanying its physical releases, comprised of their own mythology – a fictional Christian sect called Antiochanism, and their desire to escape an existence that ends in death. Deathconsciousness approaches our mortality head on.
Musically, the album is industrial, heavy, and atmospheric. The introductory track, the abstractly named ‘A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut,’ is beautifully ambient: a seven minute long, comforting prelude before it throws you into the gaping pit of lachrymosity. It’s rare for me for a bassline to be the most memorable part of a song, but it shines through particularly in ‘Bloodhail,’ a hypnotic, gothic rock anthem with an onslaught of aggressive, powerful bass guitar, the likes of which I hadn’t heard since The Cure’s Disintegration.
Deathconsciousness is split into two discs, ‘The Plow That Broke The Plains’ and ‘The Future,’ both incredible in their own right, but together, form a cohesive musical journey through the depths of the band’s vocalist Tim Macuga’s depressive state. ‘The Plow That Broke The Plains’ features the aptly named single ‘The Big Gloom,’ ethereal, floaty, and textured, with begging, pleading lyrics buried in the sound, Macuga singing, ‘Please, please, please release me.’ The track ‘Who Would Leave Their Son Out in the Sun,’ much like the rest of the album, features biblical imagery. The song, and album as a whole, grapples with the concept of an absent, uncaring, or distant God, crooning ‘But there aren’t enough archangels in the sky, to come down and make me feel right.’ The textured, expansive soundscapes of the first disc, courtesy of Dan Barrett, envelop you, and swallow you whole, the vocals lost in the distorted, atmospheric instruments.
The second disc, The Future, is even more abstract. The opening track, the entertainingly named, ‘Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail,’ tackles the soulless greed of mega-corporations, and their incompatibility with the human condition. Much unlike the majority of the album, the song takes on a more aggressive tone, the pounding industrial drums calling to mind machinery and factory lines. The lyrics, in their post-punk fashion, criticise and condemn the actions of corporations and their exploitation of workers. The penultimate track ‘I Don’t Love’ forgoes the abstract lyricism contained within the first disc and lays out Macuga’s emotional state for the world to see. The first minute is vulnerable, the instrumentation empty aside from a repetitive, echoing, almost primal drum, and the faint drip of water. The vocals are the clearest here compared to the rest of the album, before, one minute in, a huge wall of sound envelops you with no warning, the lyrics drowned out by the piercing drums, noisy guitars and driving bassline. Soon before the song ends, however, the instruments end, leaving Macuga’s raw lyrics hanging in the air. “I don’t love, I don’t feel anything, I don’t feel anything where this love should be.” The final track, Earthmover is easily my favourite of the album. It opens deceptively calmly, before a huge, enveloping, powerful wall of sound crashes through, drowning you in noise.
While it went under the radar initially in 2008, its release year, Deathconsciousness has received a second breath of life from users on online music forums, and slowly bubbled up in popularity, becoming an underground cult classic. Now critically acclaimed, the album has received the praise it undoubtedly deserves. To me, this album is perfect.
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