Review Summary: The Mirror Album Of The Greatest Album Ever Made
The synths are getting louder...
And you are tossed in a bleak ocean of sound, and the blasting reverb-drenched beats of the drum machine are the waves. Welcome to The Unnatural World, the sequel, the mirror album, of the greatest (and the most depressive, yet catharsic) album ever made - Deathconsiousness. Their relationship is like that of a dead body and a ghost... if that makes any f**king sense.
How does the, oh-so-great, mirror image looks (sounds*) like?
Well, yeah, the faces are still the same: just Dan & Tim, armed with an electric guitar, a bass guitar, a drum machine, a s**ty keyboard from the 80's and an old toy piano Tim found and some other stuff... The same story all over again? It's still melancholic and all, it still respects the "depressive post-industrial doomgaze" traditions, but it feels different, odd, almost... unnatural.
Deathconsiousness had drowned and suffocated in the distortion and noise of the wall-of-sounds and, from it's corpse, emerged an unresting ghost, which is, The Unnatural World.
The vanguard song, Guggenheim Wax Museum, breaks the ice in the 36th second with a grandiose effect-driven soundscape, and after that, the record takes a more dancy post-punk pace with Defenestration Song (which is a remake of the original version from the 2010’s Voids cassette). The lyric "It's in my nature. It gives me chills." tends to be a surprisingly addictive earworm, but it is so with purpose, because, it's an important one. Thematically, album has been built on the shoulders of it's, double-in-length, predecessor; questions of life and death are still in the air, the colors on the painting of suicide are still fresh, the but the idea of one's nature, determinism and destiny takes a firmer, bolder hold here, hence it's denying and desperate name - The Unnatural World.
The oceanic sound at the first half of the record grows and crashes and continuous in a more ambient drone fashion reaching a few angelic post-rock climaxes and, then, calms the waters down, and takes a different turn with the voice samples from a 2009 documentary named "Suffer the Little Children". With things like this, Dan and Tim masterfully create a mythos. Combining the intrigue-arousing, sinister-looking album cover art with unsettling children voice samples from an infamous mental hospital and the esoteric folklore stories which are sewn in the essence of the record, Have A Nice Life got an almost Tolkien-like story depth. You can dig deeper and deeper into the lore, until you get lost in it, like a ghost.
Deathconsiousness' end, which was a ground-shaking and emotionally exhausting crescendo, contrasts The Unnatural World's religiously meditative atmosphere and a note of uncertainty at the end. You are left with a not fully understood message, an unnerving gut feeling and a blissful trace of the leviathanic sound that was here before. Enjoy.
