If you submit yourself in full to Have a Nice Life, the listening experience has the potential to paralyze, by virtue of both the tones that the Connecticut-based duo smashes into your skull and the disparate ideas they shoehorn into improbably compact aural spaces. The strategies they employ to sneak past your defenses might not even register. You’ll look down a few minutes after a track ends to find a heart-shaped cavity slowly leaking blackened chest-goo onto the hardwood floor. The words I write stand as flimsy straw men in the open field, stranded on their poles, waiting for the winds of The Unnatural World to arrive and bowl them over again.
“Dan And Tim, Reunited By Fate” reunites Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga by fate, six years after the monumental Deathconsciousness. The pair cherrypick tropes from a number of bleak traditions: reverb-drenched industrial beats; doom-metal sludge; shoegaze drones conjured from effects pedals; post-punk bass chuggery; a plaintive piano+static post-rock crescendo. If this buffet of pan-genre depression seems ready to crumble under its own weight, HANL hold it together by matching their compositional ambitions with idiosyncratic recording and production techniques. The duo demonstrates a willingness to abandon the equilibrium of a mix at any moment with the onset of a torrential lead voice or a left turn in structure, spiking the track down into new depths of depravity over and over until the coda provides a reprieve. Vocals float somewhere behind the guitar screech and only the highs can tear out of the haze. Drum tones remain consistent as a series of conflicting atmospheres seize control. “Dan and Tim” tapers off and Dan and Tim head back into the woods.
If you let it, The Unnatural World can take over you. It arrives February 4 via The Flenser (in collaboration with HANL’s own Enemies List imprint).
• Have A Nice Life: http://enemieslist.net/kvlt/artists/have-a-nice-life
• The Flenser: http://theflenser.com
• Enemies List: http://enemieslist.net/kvlt