Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (2008)


"I've got a message that I must relay..."

Discovered this through former vocalist/guitarist of Isis (among other things), Aaron Turner, (bonus pic!) and what a fucking great find is all I can say. Have a Nice Life is composed of Dan and Tim from Connecticut, well I don't know that they are actually from there but that is where Have a Nice Life is located. Deathconsciousness is their incredibly profound, vast, double disc album. The discs are labelled 'The Plow That Broke the Plains' and 'The Future', respectively.

Deathconsciousness covers a lot of ground on their debut album: noise, metal, ambient, doom, pop, shoegaze. It lacks genre because it traverses so many, and it is everything all at once. It is sometimes heavy and sometimes 'poppy' (I use this term loosely). In general it is crushing, depressive, and haunting. It all adds up to one thing: a beautifully gloomy album.

The lyrics are based around religion and death. The allusions to death are much more obvious, while the religious aspects are harder to find. For once, the lyrics weren't so important to me listening to this album. Although a closer look reveals the lyrics are indeed worthy of praise, I really only noticed them secondarily. It is much more the way the vocals fit with the music. The way they traverse the haunting soundscapes, or not, is what is most noticeably profound.

This was also a strange album for me in that I loved it instantly, but it took a lot of listening for me to truly appreciate it. It, for me, is both of these things at the same time as well: instantaneously enjoyable but with each listen bringing something new and enthralling to discover.

As we've heard before, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", and Have a Nice Life definitely follows this mantra. With their own sound that takes influences but makes its own rules, it's nearly impossible to find a comparison, or even a starting point to describe what goes on in the sonic space that is Deathconsciousness.


No comments:

Post a Comment