Album Review: The Unnatural World by Have a Nice Life

Review Summary: Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Whether or not the proclamations by hyperzealous My Bloody Valentine acolytes that the timeless Loveless both began and ended the shoegaze era are to be believed, the album’s aftershocks sent a surge through music; restless tides of distortion, fuzz, and lo-fi decadence washed over everything, gripping anyone with an ear to the ground and scraping bedrock as it pulled the music world into its hazy brine. In the following decades, hundreds of groups partook in the raucous crusade, including Have A Nice Life, a Connecticut two-piece who on their debut double album – a move previously reserved for cocksure acts in the purported primes of their careers – reveled as much in the image of shoegaze as they did in the forms of black metal, drone, and a smorgasbord of post-everything.

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The most striking measurement of Have a Nice Life’s growth over the past couple years can be made by playing the new version of “Defenestration Song”—a high point of the Connecticut post-punk outfit’s second album, The Unnatural World—against the original version from 2010’s Voids cassette. Previously stringy and pale, the song is now brawny and dark. The bass line, once a bubbling throwback to Joy Division’s “Walked in Line”, has become a flood of sludge.

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Review Summary: Not quite the earth mover that was "Deathconsciousness," but Have a Nice Life's long awaited second record is a logical next step and a worthwhile listen nonetheless.Beginning an album review by discussing a band’s previous work is trite at best; a needlessly convenient way to lead into a meatier discussion. In the case of Have a Nice Life, however, it is absolutely necessary. Deathconsciousness isn’t an album that can just be swept under a rug, cowed down for its successor.

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The liner notes of The Unnatural World, Have a Nice Life's second LP, contain a manifesto on the advances of science and the grip of mortality, full of analytical philosophy and post-rock appropriate fear-mongering. It's kissed off with eight terrifying words about good old you: "There exists a secret plot to kill you". There probably doesn't, but I've started to believe in one anyway; this is a Bedroom Conspiracy Theory at its most convincing, unspecific and so personal in its threat against your life that the words feel suffocating.

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Marissa Nadler, July Marissa Nadler’s limnetic new album, July, is both eerie and soothing, a lullaby written to induce nightmares. Burrow deeper and the odd hallucinatory qualities reveal themselves; images blend, fade and reform with no real discernible pattern. This album is composed of memories, the kind that your mind tries to reshape over time to shield you from what really happened.

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