Deathconsciousness

''Deathconsciousness'' is the debut studio album by American rock duo Have a Nice Life, released on January 24, 2008, on Enemies List Home Recordings. Recorded independently by the band members on a budget of less than $1,000, ''Deathconsciousness'' was released as a double album; the first disc is entitled "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and the second is entitled "The Future". The original cover art features a darkened and cropped version of the painting ''The Death of Marat,'' painted by Jacques-Louis David during the French Revolution.

The album received little attention from professional music publications upon its release, but spread through internet message boards and memes. In 2019, ''Kerrang!'' noted that it "quickly became a viral hit amongst internet communities like /mu/, Sputnikmusic and Rate Your Music. Aided by their relative anonymity and ''Deathconsciousness ominous liner notes, which described a fictional medieval cult that worshipped God's murderer, ''Deathconsciousness'' quickly became the stuff of internet myth."

Composition and music

Recording

Band members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga recorded ''Deathconsciousness'' with a budget of less than US$1,000. The Flenser label owner Jonathan Tuite said: "This is a record that was created with tools that are available to anyone. Pretty easily, very cheaply, a lot of the sounds are probably presets, and it didn’t need a lot of tweaking. It’s kind of like a record made by an everyman, even though it’s a work of near-genius." In an online Q&A session, Barrett commented on the notoriously lo-fi sound achieved on the album, mentioning how "a lot of ''Deathconsciousness'' was recorded through the pinhole mic on islaptop".

The original master recordings of the album were lost during a hard drive crash, leaving the band with only 192 kbps MP3 files.

Concept and writing

Barrett described ''Deathconsciousness'' as "very closely tied to what was going on in my life at the time of its recording", adding that it "emerged naturally from my writing". He explained that the album is a response to Western culture's tendency to avoid discussing death, stating, "It does exist, and for a long time it was all I could talk or think about. That naturally influenced the music, lyrics, even the packaging." The writing and recording process was slow and took between five to six years. Macuga noted, "Some of the songs were re-recorded multiple times; some of them abandoned altogether." Other tracks were set aside for future releases because they didn't align with the album's intended theme. The band's progress was further slowed by distance and work constraints which restricted them to only have time to "work a couple times a month". Barrett emphasized that the album was created without any expectation of an audience, noting that they "would've written the exact same record if we were the last two people on Earth".

Music and lyrics

Barrett was quoted as saying, "The lyrics were written simultaneously with the songs, though I tend to work in scraps... I'm constantly writing, then culling pieces that I think fit the music to build entire songs around. At the time I had a job where I would have to be into work at 4:30 in the morning, alone in a giant building, at a desk in front of a giant window. I wrote reams and reams during that time." Regarding how the project came to fruition, Barrett remarked that "We didn’t have a grand plan for it. A couple things ended up happening. We were recording songs and we had a bunch of stuff we didn’t know what to do with. We had a lot of material always because we would just get together and always write new stuff, and never work on the old stuff. I think it started coming together as a project, like my dad passed away and I think that sort of threw things sharply into focus."

The album's style has been described as dark ambient and gothic rock; its tone " apocalyptic". It has also been associated with several genres, including shoegaze, post-rock, and industrial rock. ''Deathconsciousness'' is a concept album; Jason Heller of ''Pitchfork'' identified the thesis of the album as the view that "Existence is bleak, gallows humor undergirds it, and sometimes wallowing in that sick paradox is the best revenge".

Barrett picked "The Big Gloom", his personal favorite, as the most emotional song on the album to put together, while Tim Macuga chose "Earthmover", specifically the loud ending. The "bass drop" at the end of the song came from Macuga slamming his bass guitar onto the floor out of frustration and leaving the room as a result of recording difficulties.

Cover

The original cover art for ''Deathconsciousness'' features a darkened and cropped version of the painting ''The Death of Marat'' with a slightly increased contrast, painted by Jacques-Louis David during the French Revolution. In an interview with ''Revolver'', Barrett explained that the band's limited budget influenced them to explore public domain artwork.

Release

''Deathconsciousness'' was released on January 24, 2008, under the label Enemies List Home Recordings; it is Have a Nice Life's debut studio album. Released as a double album, it features two discs entitled "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The Future". A 70-page booklet written by Dan Barrett accompanied the album, although the booklet refers to a nameless religious history professor from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as its author. It details the life, death, and teachings of Antiochus, the leader of a fictional religious sect created by Barrett. The album was reissued in 2009 by Enemies List, re-pressing the album on vinyl and CD, with new cover art. The reissue included a 70-page booklet with various paintings and lyrics. Another reissue of ''Deathconsciousness'' was released September 17, 2014 by Enemies List and The Flenser.

Reception and legacy

The album received little to no attention from music publications upon its release, although Nick Greer of Sputnikmusic gave it four-and-a-half stars out of five and the album placed at No. 94 on the website's Top 100 Albums of the Decade list. Piero Scaruffi described the album as a "hybrid of My Bloody Valentine's shoegaze-pop, Joy Division's dark-punk, Godspeed You Black Emperor's post-rock, Nine Inch Nails' industrial dirges, and the Swans' proto-doom".

Though the band members expected it to linger in obscurity, the album has, in the years following its release, gained a substantial cult following, especially in online music communities such as 4chan's /mu/, the website's imageboard for musical discussion, where it is considered an "essential" album. The album is also acclaimed on the Reddit community r/Indieheads. Mike LeSuer of ''Flood'' described the album as a "meme-worthy cultural moment". As of 2019, the album had been re-issued seven times. Also in 2019, the band performed the album in its entirety at the Dutch metal festival Roadburn.

Barrett said, "We saw an Italian magazine put it on the best albums of the year list next to Portishead and Meshuggah and thought, 'Oh god, they think we’re a real band!'"

The opening track "A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut" was sampled by producer John Mello for a song by rapper Lil Peep on a track titled "Shiver". Macuga remarked, "I recorded that guitar part in my bathtub and now it’s on the front page of ''Us Weekly'' for a rapper’s eulogy." For the week ending in April 18, 2024, "A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut" debuted at No. 30 on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart.

Later releases from artists in the shoegaze and gothic rock genres can be compared to ''Deathconsciousness'', particularly in their use of atmospheric, moody soundscapes. Bands like Deafheaven and Planning for Burial, though heavier in tone, evoke similar emotional depth and genre-blending approaches. Both these bands echo the album's mixture of post-punk, industrial, and black metal elements with a unique emotional depth that extends into themes of nihilism, loneliness, and existential despair.

Accolades

Track listing

References

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2008 debut albums
Have a Nice Life albums
The Flenser albums