Now, HANL have gone from being known for complete unpredictability to actually being known for being kinda consistent, so it's no surprise at all that their new album Sea of Worry is yet another excellent LP. In some ways, the high quality of The Unnatural World was even more surprising than that of Deathconsciousness, because it's one thing to write an accidental cult classic, but it's another to follow it with a record that's at least as good. As with most of the best experimental pop, Magdalene's daring musical tendencies go down like crushed pills mixed with honey. On paper, it might seem like a less accessible album than its predecessor (except "Holy Terrain"), but it doesn't really feel that way when you're listening. LP1 was a pretty beat-driven record, but Magdalene often succeeds with songs that only have a faint hint of percussion. As much as twigs can often be very maximalist, she strips things back a lot on Magdalene (the aforementioned lead single/album closer "Cellophane" is pretty bare-bones and heartstring-tugging too), and it's a testament to her power as an artist that she can be so impactful on this quieter album. It kind of reminds me of the first time I heard Beach House's "Real Love," the song where they pretty much dropped their whole aesthetic and proved they could tug at the heartstrings with something a little more bare-bones and traditional. For an artist who frequently manipulates her face on her album artwork and the sound of her music, it's extra stunning to hear a song like the heartbreaking "Mirrored Heart," where Twigs just belts it with no filter over some simple piano. Instead it moves, and moves others with it.Twigs also embraces a lot of atmospheric balladry on this album, and it's allowed her to put raw emotion in the forefront more so than on LP1. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Where fellow travelers such as the Soft Moon and Cold Cave religiously exult in the darkwave tradition, Have a Nice Life use The Unnatural World to distance themselves from any kind of retroactive pull. They hover over the rest of the songs like an unspoken, fatalistic threat-an ominous horizon that can’t be escaped from. The album’s matched pair of drumless tracks, “Music Will Untune the Sky” and “Emptiness Will Eat the Witch”, are equal parts brooding interlude and mocking reprieve. Hope, however, is still nowhere in sight. Rather than feeling like morbid exploitation, “Crospey” slowly morphs into a goth-dub uproar that tears loose a heart of tenderness and empathy. Accordingly, the song’s spiraling synths and ghostly wails evoke stolen innocence, nerve-deadened dread, and cries for a rescue that may never come. “Cropsey”, named after Staten Island’s eerie, mad-slasher urban legend, opens with an even more chilling sample: testimony from a young boy named Johnny, an inmate of the notoriously abusive Pennsylvania mental institution Pennhurst that was featured in the 1968 exposé Suffer the Little Children. When the track’s skeletal tangle of beats and static finally disintegrates, all that’s left is hellish echo. Hints of shoegaze gauziness and industrial pneumatics float through “Unholy Life”, even as “Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate” bypasses what would appear to be cheeky self-mythology in favor of dour, murky balladry. Smothered in sorrow, “Guggenheim Wax Museum” plods and throbs in time with some cosmic, cancerous organ.
On “Burial Society”, a rolling blackout of congealed noise only barely clothes a sumptuous, lonesome vocal melody-one that’s as full of rage as it is resignation. But instead of sporting the sort of smart-ass song titles found on Deathconsciousness (“Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000”, “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail”), The Unnatural World submerges most of the duo’s bitter irony, or at least the irony, leaving nothing but the bitter.įor all its unrelenting gloom, The Unnatural World oozes beauty.
It’s taken six years to issue a proper follow-up, but their central message hasn’t changed: Existence is bleak, gallows humor undergirds it, and sometimes wallowing in that sick paradox is the best revenge. Founded by core members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, Have a Nice Life came on strong with their 2008 debut, Deathconsciousness, then seemed to retreat in the face of an imminent breakthrough.