How long of a break, in terms of writing, did you take between Deathconsciousness and The Unnatural World? Or was it more of a continuous process? Members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga answered my questions over email, and talked about their new record, new label, and same old writing style.
The record blends grimy programmed beats with distorted vocals and blazing guitars, Throbbing Gristle, Bauhaus and Nine Inch Nails all in one.
Instead it moves, and moves others with it.After several quiet years in hibernation, Have a Nice Life returned earlier this year with a fantastic full-length, The Unnatural World, its best and most concise work to date. 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.
HAVE A NICE LIFE GUGGENHEIM WAX MUSEUM LYRICS 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. 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.
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