I'm somewhat glad that Have a Nice Life kept their sophomore album under 50 minutes: if they hadn't I might have become far too depressed to enjoy the LP as much as I did. The very name, The Unnatural World, hints at the darkness encompassed in its post-punk turned drone and noise tinged tracks. And believe me, it is one dark, gloomy album. The lo-fi quality of the recording and screwed production fit well with the darkwave vibe here, gripping the listener with a certain feeling of vast blackness - I like to describe the music here like an unceasing haziness that occasionally turns on the listener to become a crushing oppressive fear of an inevitable future doom.
On first listen, what first struck me musically was the continuity of the album - I want to say it's elegant, but I'm not sure if such a positive word would fit the arc of this nearly-nauseating collection of songs. The album is not only musically speaking a single sonic piece of writing, but also lyrically it harps on repeated images and themes. From what I can tell, the songs largely deal with death, hopelessness, and tortured souls. Beyond that, there is an implied social critique throughout. Something that any socialist/left-anarchist can dig. In the songs "Burial Society," "Emptiness Will Eat the Witch," and "Guggenheim Wax Museum" there is repeated imagery of digging/soil and impending death. Connect this with the title of "Burial Society" - a song, that this reviewer takes to be set on the top of building whist the narrator considers jumping off (imagery of suicide is repeated throughout the song) - and we get the hint of a social critique: society makes people this way. In "Cropsey," I hear support for this reading.
"Cropsey" opens and ends with narration that sounds like it's straight out of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song. The narration comes from a documentary about the Pennhurst State School for Children. It's quite unsettling. Again, the implication here is a social critique. I think that the entire song is written from the perspective of a child living there:
"And I’ve been waiting on everyone
I’ve been waiting on
Cause I’ve been waiting on anyone
To show up and throw me out of here"
You can view the video about the state school here:
Soot is another recurring theme, along with soil, death and earth - suggesting to my ear, along with some imagery of "Burial Society," a sort of mutilated Urbanism like that of Lynch's Eraserhead or Scott's Blade Runner. The message of this album might be summed up thusly - "this place is destroyed and so is our lives, when I look inside myself all is see is a horrible emptiness that I would like nothing more than to negate. We are all doomed." A sort of nihilism that sees no hope. The music fits this theme, save for "Cropsey" and "Music Will Untune the Sky" there are barely any major chords at all. And in "Music Will Untune the Sky" what we receive is a sort of tortured cry for repentance from a God that doesn't exist - hardly something to rejoice about. Moreover, there are hardly any clean guitar tones on the entire LP - with the notable exception of the closer, "Emptiness Will Eat the Witch." Most guitars, bass, synth, anything really is distorted and tortured like the characters that narrate the songs on the album.
Exactly what is causing society to produce the depressed, hopeless, doomed people that populate the narrators in this release is left a mystery - but those of us on the Left need not wonder. What we get with this album is an explosion of the current coordinates of the worst of our society and the darkest possible portrayal of those most completely ran over in the steam-roller that is capitalist production. The last thing that these characters will do is have a nice life, especially in the Urbanism of an unnatural world.
Essential tracks: "Burial Society," "Cropsey," "Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate," "Emptiness Will Eat the Witch"
Rating: 9/10
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