My first album review is a combination review of one of my favorite albums and an album that has turned into this giant sleeper hit. An album that I feel, has gone virtually unnoticed for the longest time, only to be to discussed and shared on the most esoteric and perhaps pretentious of music loving communities on the Internet. It has been reviewed by only so few critics in the past couple of years, but yet no tremendous momentum has been gained for it. Not even Pitchfork, one of the main proprietors of bringing to light underground and indie artists to a more mainstream level, has reviewed this album. This album, is Deathconsciousness. It was initially released at the very beginning of 2008 by the post-punk band, Have A Nice Life.
The band itself is a simple duo from Connecticut; Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga. Together, they spent a grudgingly long five years to create this modern day masterpiece. A masterpiece whose original master files were lost in an unexpected hard drive crash. The closet thing we have to the masters are lossless audio files. Thank god for FLAC and other audio codecs. You can pretty much archive any album in perfect quality, just in case the apocalypse occurs.
Deathconsciousness is what I would imagine to be if post-punk and shoegaze could get to their most darkest and ominous points, without it being straight up industrial or sinister ambient like Nine Inch Nails or the spooky bits of Aphex Twin. The album can generally be regarded as a post-punk album that beautifully blends reverb vocals, fuzzy guitar strumming, sharp gun-shot snare drumming, and brooding bass that underlies everything. Even then, I'm still missing a few intricate sounds that are present in each song that helps to make each song distinguishable from every other one. The album flows like a long dream that has different modes and phases to it, but it's all still the same dream. It can be considered as a wonderful mix of shoegaze, post-punk, drone, ambient, and even post-rock.
Technically speaking, the album is a double album, clocking in at about 1 hour and 26 minutes. If you buy a physical copy of the album, the first half is entitled The Plow That Broke The Plains, while the the second half of the album is The Future. While I would consider the first half of the album to be a bit more enjoyable, that doesn't mean I don't love the second half. If I had to conceptualize the album in a more literary mentality, the first half of the album seems to represent this ongoing, internal struggle of some sort, but a on a more calm and tame-like basis. The second half of the album is like that internal suffering and anxiety being let out and given the opportunity to lash out. Even the cover of the album is an obvious attempt to instill a sense of dreadfulness in the listener, as a few may recognize on the spot that the cover is actually a crop and darkened edit of the modernist painting, The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, depicting the death scene of French Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat when he was murdered while taking a bath.
Surprisingly enough, this album is not as stressful as what the titles of the songs or the album cover may suggest. It's actually quite enjoyable in a more conventional sense. There are even times when the album is strangely relaxing. It's possible that some songs could even take one to sleep if one was on the verge of slipping away for the night. In fact, the very thing has happened to me. When I first began to listen to this album, it was always in the dead of night when I nothing else to do but wait for myself to get tired, so I would pick up where I had last left off on the album and somehow in the midst of it's occasional blurry and reverb atmosphere, and I'll just drift away not realizing that I already fell asleep.
The most shoegazy song on the album, in my opinion, is "The Big Gloom". It starts off as a relatively soft piece that becomes insanely heavy half way through it, utilizing the typical fuzzy and blurry pedal effects for guitar strumming accompanied by ethereal like vocals that feel like they are just floating in the air above you. The heavy part of the song is almost as stunning as it's softer counterpart. The song can almost serve as a microcosm for the whole album: this constant battle between the soft & ethereal and the dark & brooding.
But of course, there are so many other highlights on this album that I can also show off for their equally alluring nature. The track "There Is No Food" is like the sound of giving up on hope, and not even wanting to face the abominable future, even though you know its coming. "Bloodhail" is a song that is more reminiscent of old-school post-punk, for those who may like Joy Division. "I Don't Love" is really close in style to the "The Big Gloom" in that it's a shoegazy track, except this one revels deeply in a lo-fi sound. So much in fact that the song begins to blur everything together into a wall of sound until the words "...this love should be!" end it away suddenly. The concluding song to the album "Earthmover", is as epic as its title suggests. The bulk of track attempts to encompass everything that the album had to offer the listener and end the album with a long, drawn out bang. Like epic jam sessions before it, like the ending to White Light/White Heat, "Earthmover" really brings it all home and ends on a sudden but appropriate note.
This album, like many other long driven albums that exceed the one hour mark by a significant amount, can be seen as this staggering but rewarding journey to embark on, if you're up for it of course. Deathconsciousness may be not as monolithic or as tough as a modem day Swans album, but it sure as hell presents itself like an immense storm destroying everything in its path.
Overall: 9.0 out of 10
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