![]() 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. Have a nice life dan barrett full#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. Fans of Have A Nice Life exhibit both cultic thought and action for good reason-it is perhaps a fanbase as dark and mysterious as the Antiochean’s, which the album itself revolves around.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. It feels more fresh and engaging with every listen and has held up as a remarkable piece of art. The corresponding album is rhythmic, primal and expansive, and is a gloomy-post-punk masterpiece-a mediation on death, loss and existence. Blurring the lines between novella, liner notes, and academic text, the zine itself presents an engrossing narrative. ![]() ![]() The 75-page booklet accompanying the deluxe format of Deathconsciousness details the dark and forgotten history of the Antiochean cult. Now, longtime HANL collaborator The Flenser will reissue Deathconsciousness on the long-requested CD format, with a deluxe packaging option, including the lengthy accompanying zine and housed in a heavy box. Seamlessly blending shoegaze, post punk, new wave, industrial and noise with unparalleled depth and weight, the album was originally released by Enemies List Home Recordings founded by HANL members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga. ![]() Six years after its release the band followed up with 2014’s stunner The Unnatural World, and by then Deathconsciousness had become a force of influence and fanatic obsession. In 2008, Have A Nice Life released their now cult classic Deathconsciousness album to a whimper and critical non-interest. ![]()
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