He wails angrily, followed only by the empathetic instrumentation of thick guitar drones in its haunting closing minutes. But it has its own internal crescendo whilst Dan’s voice never really raises itself it’s obvious he’s shouting, practically screaming towards the track’s midpoint climax: The vocals are similarly more direct, cutting through the Post-Punk instrumentation with a distinctly hollow sound to them, a certain emptiness as Dan sings about the nature of life, shivering as he contemplates aging: “There’s nothing I can do to make it stop” he sings painfully, the track’s length and claustrophobic sound doubling this feeling down.īut there’s also a slower and more beauteous side to the album, as evidenced in “Burial Society”, which at first rolls along slowly rather like a Giles Corey (Dan’s side project) piece in the expansive piano strokes and lush, smeared guitars collapsing the pace. Popular pre-release single “Defenestration Song” is a bit more committed and kicks up the pace a notch with growling guitar riffs and a stark drum line. It crawls along menacingly really, Dan slowly and carefully laying out barely audible words to match the funerial march of the drums before it climaxes in an abrasive wailing myriad of textures that slowly fade to nothing. That’s not to say this album doesn’t still have scale though opener “Guggenheim Wax Museum” spends its first minute languishing in quiet, distal, faded drones before blaring into view with something that could sound like a battered organ or some guitar deeply ensconced in a processed fuzz. It’s a rather expansive album that I really have to be in the mood for, so it’s convenient that not only have Dan and Tim refined their sound and focus on their eventual followup, but they’ve also made it nicely bitesized at around 50 minutes.

It’s not something I’ve come back to often, I must admit. Six years ago, Have A Nice Life brought out the album that would eventually garner cult status and bring them to popularity, Deathconsciousness. It’s a pretty epic work an 80 minute titan of crushing Post-Punk and Shoegaze, but almost satirical in its presentation as it took casual swipes at the ridiculous nature of our society.

Have a nice life unnatural world