Have A Nice Life - The Awareness of Death

That title: Deathconsciousness. That dark, weighty cover art, loaded with historical and philosophical meaning: "La Mort de Marat" by Jacques-Louis David. That sound: monolithic, oppressive, crushing, final. The imposing length: an hour and twenty-five minutes split into two parts titled "The Plow That Broke The Plains" and "The Future".

When Have A Nice Life's debut landed on the (admittedly few) record store shelves and in the pages of the music press back in January 2008, it felt like being in the presence of a major tome, the summa, the cynical, existentialist culmination of a long and imposing career. Even after hearing it, and being completely overwhelmed by it, Deathconsciousness felt like anything but a debut. Granted, Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga had been working together under the Have A Nice Life name for a full eight years by that point, plenty of time to experiment with sound and find the perfect alchemy, but Deathconsciousness goes well beyond both of those milestones and really does feel like an endpoint, the end of a journey.

And in a sense it is, to the point that the Connecticut duo never tried to repeat it, instead using their subsequent records to all but distance themselves from such a definitive approach and tackle songwriting in a less complex way.

Setting aside comparisons with such a towering debut, what we're left with are, in effect, two solid and significant experimental gothic-rock records, which confirmed the band's stature and sealed their status as a modern classic of the genre.

Made with decidedly non up-to-date, DIY means (which only makes it a more extraordinary achievement) for Enemies List Home Recordings, Deathconsciousness was described by the band itself as the most depressing record in the history of music. But what does an album that depressed actually sound like? What does a record sound like when it's wheezing under the crushing weight of a boulder as enormous as the awareness of death, of human transience and of the vanity of our socio-cultural complications? Sure, we could take a strictly critical-scientific approach and list off the genres touched by this dark musical brew (everything from the blankets of effects and shoegaze wails of bands like My Bloody Valentine to the most spectral ambient, to NIN), all grafted by the duo onto the gothic-rock skeleton and drum machines of their compositions. But doing so would do a disservice to a unique, one-of-a-kind work, one whose nature is fundamentally narrative and expressionist.

Take the album's opening, whose ability to conjure actual images, as if you were watching a film, is downright shocking. "A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut": we're in a dark forest, guitar and sinister drones echo through the thick foliage, letting Malick-esque shafts of light filter through. A tormented peace, needled by some lowly demon, disturbed, uneasy because it knows its time is short. But a peace nonetheless, one onto which the eternal worm comes crashing down, devastating it in the guise of an airless beat, slow but relentless, and a serpentine bass, a monster from the deepest caverns. The guitar and the anguished vocals of "Bloodhail" can do nothing but weep and bleed, succumbing lifeless to the attack; it's surely the most accessible, most comfortably post-punk track of the bunch, and so (for many) the band's banner song.

The film continues among the debris and the dust clotted together with spilled blood: Connecticut has been devoured, gutted, so that "The Big Gloom" can roam through its rubble, tearing open noise chasms that lead straight down to hell.

More self-contained, but just as cinematic, are the nearly ten minutes of "Hunter", which only kicks in with urgent beats and gothic guitars in its second half, after a long opening stretch of penitent, hushed ambient and unsettling filtered voices. "Telephony" brings a bit of lightness, and though it remains depressed, its volumes flattened by the mixing, it almost takes on the soft pop curves of the mellower side of The Cure. It's another four minutes of peace, as deceptive as the one in the opener, only this time it won't be swept away by a rhythm, by some apocalyptic monster thirsty for death. In its place, anguish rendered as ambient, scarred by screeching droning fingers dragged across glass ("Who Would Leave Their Son Out In The Sun?"). The first half of the album closes with "There Is No Food", another ambient experiment suspended in the grey, empty spaces of a neglected house: there's no food, there's no partner, there's no love. There's only loneliness and the distraction of some comforting, docile, reassuring sound. The hum of a refrigerator.

Less liquid and ethereal, "The Future" is a louder, more concrete, and if you will, rougher second half of Deathconsciousness. It's no coincidence, then, that it opens with a heavily guitar-driven track half-jokingly titled "Waiting For Black Metal Records To Come In The Mail", a telling glimpse into a less obvious corner of Macuga and Barrett's background (after all, the label that put out Deathconsciousness deals mainly in that genre). Besides being more fragmented, in the sense that it's made up of more self-contained episodes, "The Future" differs from "The Plow That Broke The Plains" in the energy it gives off, utterly unlike the supernatural, biblical forces that haunted the first, spectral half.

Here the guitars take on a key role, finally stepping into the spotlight, embodying a deeply human, desperate urgency that burns and spends itself clawing to break free from an insurmountable, unyielding prison of rubble. Light isn't guaranteed, but perhaps a calmer future is, one of quiet coexistence with the deadly revelation.

The harshest guitars, whose effects accentuate their jagged bone structure and ferrous essence, are found on the blazing "Deep, Deep", while those on "Waiting For Black Metal Records To Come In The Mail" linger at length over a pair of dull, muffled riffs.

The oddest episode of the lot, and paradoxically the most easy listening, is a lo-fi chant set over a bed of brushed acoustic guitar and limping piano. The track, titled "Holy Fucking Shit: 40.000", boils over into a finale of beat-machine lashes and wild distortion that bring to mind the most apocalyptic industrial.

Shoegaze, up to that point only a fleeting, sparing flavor, takes over the long final stretch made up of "I Don't Love" and the titanic "Earthmover". The former has a moan of relief rising over waves of feedback pouring off the guitars; it's an almost relaxed moment, but it's lying to itself — "I Don't Love" — You'd like that. The latter instead ranks among the shoegaze peaks of the new millennium; here, though, the genre is recoded, plunged into a sea of pitch, from which the lacerating guitars can only emerge sticky and mephistophelian.

Even more astonishing because it's essentially homemade, the meticulous work done on the sounds through overdubs, loops and cut-and-paste editing of the played parts manages to give each track's music its own space and dimension. Equally staggering is the operation carried out simultaneously on the vocals, which thanks to effects are transfigured and placed in ever-changing settings, sounding by turns ethereal, otherworldly or human.

The references and citations with which Macuga and Barrett, terminal nerds that they are, have literally peppered Deathconsciousness number in the thousands and span a range running from neo-Platonist philosophers to "Da Da Da" by Trio (the famous Neue Deutsche Welle band), whose beat is sampled on "Holy Fucking Shit: 40.000". Any attempt to catch them all and piece together a satisfying mosaic would therefore be impossible. Anyone interested in venturing into such a forest of symbols and signs can delve into the album's booklet, an almost eighty-page tome written by a university professor who didn't shy away from the daunting challenge.

In some ways, a follow-up to Deathconsciousness didn't even seem like something one was entitled to expect. Of course it would have been nice to see Have A Nice Life back at work, to hear new material, but had they never resurfaced, the devoted cult that formed around the duo in those years would have made peace with it anyway, resting on a legacy already deemed priceless. Instead, six years later, here's the duo (who, between side projects and their own label The Flenser, hadn't exactly been sitting on their hands) returning. With The Unnatural World, a work that even in appearance already radiated less grandeur and finality, revealing aspirations that were, in a sense, scaled back. It's certainly a more ordinary album than its predecessor, but that doesn't make it negligible or dispensable — if anything, it's a rather fine and original work within the gothic field, a rare commodity both then and now.

Besides featuring one of the most unsettling bass lines from the celebrated firm of Barrett & Macuga, "Dan And Tim, Reunited By Fate" playfully toys with the theme of return, giving listeners a reason for the unexpected comeback.

The opening is, as usual, spectral and vividly imaginative. We're in the "Guggenheim Wax Museum": a sinister murmur hovers among the wax statues, while guitar and beat machine mark the shuffling footsteps of an ancient ghost. The guitar-driven finale delivers one of the most piercing guitar high notes in the band's entire output.

Far more physical, "Defenestration Song" closes with what we might call the only true guitar solo ever recorded by Have a Nice Life, so good and so well placed that it makes you wish for more. "Burial Society" raises the amount of electronics and beats in the mix, giving Barrett room to let a desperate yet commanding refrain echo through empty, sacred spaces. Unsurprisingly gray, its clouds are scratched and shaped by sinister drone gusts, is the sky of the ambient piece "Music Will Untune The Sky".

The seven minutes of "Cropsey" are a massive wall of noise that coils in on itself and swallows up the surrounding space like a black hole, but it has a heart of gold: a faint, achingly sweet, lopsided player-piano melody that, despite the deafening noise, always remains clearly audible. It fades out amid the distant chimes and funereal organ drones of "Emptyness Will Eat The Witch", an album that, had it not come after Deathconsciousness, could have marked the start of a thoroughly respectable (if still decidedly experimental) modern gothic-rock career, and might have met with far more favor and far fewer disappointments — disappointments that, in any case, were only ever voiced by the usual sourpuss critics and the most hardline fans.

On the verge of twenty years of activity, Have A Nice Life are no longer what they once were — that incomparable demonic hand grabbing you by the leg and dragging you down, leaving you to drown in blood in the depths of Marat's tub. Or perhaps it's Deathconsciousness itself that stands as a one-off, a monolith of despair and awareness destined never to be repeated. Indeed, the Middletown duo took a full six years before resurfacing, with The Unnatural World, a less shocking album, but just as personal and recognizable, one that would establish Barrett and Macuga among the most solid post-punk acts of our time.

Sea Of Worry, at least in its first half, has even more conventionally gothic-rock traits and increasingly less experimental structures, but it reinforces the conviction that the band, despite a rather sparse catalog, can aspire to the rank of a genre classic.

Placed at the opening, the title track immediately sets up a granite-hard, dark and virulent sound, with the guitars tearing through dark spaces, while "Dracula Bells" has a guitar intro that brazenly recalls Interpol, offering a comparison that (one suspects) would have even displeased the band some time ago. In its geometric, skeletal finale, the song returns to more typically HANL territory, presenting edges and unease far less escapable than those built by Paul Banks and company.

"Science Beat" stands in a category of its own, with a beat machine front and center and all around it a sea of placid synthetic waves, whose waters are then whipped by a riff bordering on twee-pop that even sounds vaguely joyful; it's the brightest moment of an entire career. "Trespasser W" raises the volume again, and with the most muscular, direct riff on the record, proves to be another post-punk landmine.

All of Barrett and Macuga's leanings toward experimentation and looser structures have been condensed into a final triptych lasting twenty-three minutes in total, which will satisfy those who prefer the band in this mode. "Everything We Forget" is a hazy limbo of drones and transcendental keyboards; "Lords Of Tresserhorn" begins in the same swamp, but with a cavernous bass added to stir up the mud and a voice ravaged by filters, culminating in an explosion of noise and ethereal blur.

It closes with “Destinos”: thirteen minutes of ravings about the afterlife from a preacher, his voice gradually strangled by sinister Gregorian choirs and swallowed by the black folk of an acoustic guitar that grows steadily heavier - it's impossible not to think here of Current 93. Masterful is the entrance of the electric guitar and the piercing synthesizers for an inescapable, pitch-black finale. 

As usual, the production and artwork are excellent, with a cover different from those of the previous records, yet incredibly fascinating, with dozens of symbols hidden within its geometries.

Appendix: side and solo projects by Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga

What follows is an appendix with no claim to being exhaustive on the pair's side or solo projects, since, as good label bosses, they get their hands into just about everything and try out numerous divertissements.

Confined to the sole moniker The Flowers Of St. Francis, under which only three murky volumes of drone-noise music were released (The Flowers Of St. Francis Vol. 1, Vol. 2 and Vol. 3), Tim Macuga's solo career proves negligible compared to that of the far more prolific Dan Barrett. Before delving into the latter, let's start with a few brief notes on two projects involving both members. Two names, Gate and Nahvalr, useful for pinning down more precisely some of the influences that, along with many others, led to the perfect synthesis of Have A Nice Life.

Dating back to 2008, with just one self-titled album to its name (released a few months after Deathconsciousness), Nahvalr is a black metal project with sudden dark-ambient interludes, involving the duo on their own. Nahvalr is a monolithic record, an hour and five minutes long and pitch black throughout, its eight tracks mixed back to back without a break. Guitars distorted to the point of making their chords unrecognizable and demonic shrieks rage in the most abrasive, caustic moments, while restless spirits seem to float through a ruined house during the breath-held passages. Admittedly not a particularly significant or distinctive work, the record can still pique the interest of anyone comfortable with the genres in question and its darkest moods.

Also traceable solely to Barrett and Macuga, the Gate moniker finds the two tackling post-hardcore and noise. Dating from 2014, the same year as The Unnatural World, the EP Now, While They Aren’t Looking, Tear It Apart packs the pair's post-hardcore legacy into just under fifteen minutes. The fine cover art, depicting a gladiator brutally finishing off a fight he's already won, is the vessel for 4 guitar lashings over which the musicians lay down an unprecedented punk vocal delivery, a far cry from the pyrotechnic vocal acrobatics of the main project.

While the releases under the names Nahvalr and Gate come across as relatively spontaneous one-offs, digressions taken as a breather from the main project, Dan Barrett's solo outings, especially those under the name Giles Corey, make up what we won't hesitate to call a genuine solo career, developed mostly between Deathconsciousness and The Unnatural World.

The brief but interesting Corey saga begins in 2011 with an album titled simply Giles Corey, released through the usual Enemies List. The song titles, as evocative as ever, nod to the depression and literature typical of Have A Nice Life: empty churches, graves piled with books, Burton-esque ghostly brides, sleeping hearts. What differs entirely is the sonic apparatus, here crooked, hazy, static and disorientingly dusty, a set of desolate black-and-white photographs through which folk and slowcore litanies drift like a dark presence. Despite the radical shift in sonic scenery compared to Have A Nice Life, the heavy use of drum machines and samples remains a constant.

In short, Giles Corey is a highly recommended listen, if only to hear Barrett's voice finally stripped of alienating effects and demonic distortions.

The second record under the Giles Corey name (Deconstructionist, 2012), a demanding and somewhat pretentious slab of ambient-drone spread across three acts that comfortably exceed an hour in total length, proves instead to be a wearisome and self-indulgent listen.

On the cover of Deconstructionist, however, an image appears that proves extremely useful in linking us to another of Dan Barrett's projects, and the last one in this modest survey: Black Wing.

On the artwork of Corey's second LP, a couple of kids watch a menacing cloud of smoke rise over a rural landscape. On that of … Is Doomed, we see the same cloud of smoke, by now very much resembling a black wing, emerging and spreading from the chimney of a small wooden house set amid fields of grain.

What is probably Barrett's most interesting project is perhaps also the simplest in terms of technique and intent: darkwave with an extremely high synthetic quotient, sung by Dan with a few less filters than usual. Heavy synths are the main ingredient of the dish, while the beats vary in weight, sometimes serving as accompaniment and sometimes taking over the rest of the arrangement, as happens on the industrial number “Black Wing”. Featuring an enchanting, long tail of synthesizers that glitter like the crystals of an antique chandelier, “Death Sentences” would be worth the price of admission on its own; while “If I Let Him In” reveals notable points of contact with the work of John Maus.

Five years later, in 2020, Black Wing's second chapter arrives: No Moon.

Darkness takes center stage on both records, right from the covers. On the first, it takes the shape of black smoke rising from the chimney of an isolated house; on this new one, it's a moonless sky reflected in a crack that runs deep into the hillside, presumably all the way down to hell.

While still remaining the most melodic project in the Have A Nice Life universe, on "No Moon" Black Wing shuffles the deck: its catchy synth lines shy away from the reassuring confines of song form, tending instead to dissolve into unhealthy chillwave textures ("Ominous 80", "Always A Last Time") or twist into malformed evolutions ("Choir Of Assholes/You Think It'll Make You Happy But It Won't"). Even the rounder, clearer synth riffs, like those on "Is This Real Life, Jesus Christ" and "Bollywood Apologetics", are denied the consolation of a chorus, left to be ridden only by Barnett's metallic wail.

"Vulnerable" is a noise bombardment inflicted on a choir of souls in purgatory, over which Black Wing pours volleys of distorted percussion with the intensity of a laser beam; while "Sleep Apneac" is a slow litany of lethargic beats, set off by the grief-stricken singing of a crooner emerging from an old gramophone.

After the long (admittedly a bit too long) and majestic closer "Twinkling", a mammoth excursion through noise and analog synths, the record comes to an end: a varied and at times daring work that certainly doesn't reach the imaginative power of Have A Nice Life, but lends unprecedented depth to their side project.

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