The Unnatural World

Have a Nice Life make music that\'s exceedingly gloomy and austere. Tim Macuga and Dan Barrett (also of the space-noise outfit Giles Corey) comprise Have a Nice Life. After their 2008 debut, *Deathconsciousness*—which felt like a stalled-out black cloud, just hanging there about to burst open and rain down some unholy substance—they\'ve come out with *The Unnatural World*, a slightly less oppressive collection of tunes. With undertones of artists like Swans, Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, and Cold Cave (not to mention a good dose of Scandinavian black metal), *The Unnatural World* somehow perseveres in injecting a frightening beauty into the mix, from the bleakest drones in songs like “Guggenheim Wax Museum” to the crust-wrapped beats of the majestic “Burial Society” and the Ian Curtis–haunted “Defenestration Song.” (“Walked in Line” seeps all the way through that tune.) Pretty much all seven minutes of “Cropsey” are unsettling, from the snippets of an interview with a young resident of a notorious mental institution to the sudden shift into stifling layers of metallic, thunderous murk and muffled spoken word.

For all its unrelenting gloom, the Connecticut post-punk outfit Have a Nice Life's six-years-in-the-making second album, The Unnatural World, oozes beauty. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place.

Have a Nice Life - The Unnatural World review: Not quite the earth mover that was