Deathconsciousness is a hodgepodge of various musical styles such as drone, post-punk, shoegaze, and industrial. It’s the most transparent, forced kind of “experimentation” and doesn’t feel authentic. These genres never combine to create something new: Have a Nice Life merely switch between them to appear eclectic. As such, Deathconsciousness has no sonic unity and is only cohesive as an album with the general “dark” tone that pervades through it.

Deathconsciousness is also stupidly long, as you might expect from a band that doesn’t actually have songwriting skills and just sticks whatever ideas they come up with together without any regard for what’s worth keeping and what isn’t and what belongs where. The contrived pseudo-intellectual, brooding “tortured genius” vibe will appeal to the current generation of spoiled white 20-something year-olds.

Okay, my melodramatic pissbaby rant is done. Sorry. I just don’t like this album. “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail” is my favorite song, it’s cool. Points for originality even though I don’t think it was successful. This also isn’t shoegaze, just so no one is mislead. There’s shoegaze elements here for sure, but droning, feedback-laden guitars make up a small portion of the album’s running time. This is a post-rock album, but it seems like inertia has ensured no one will call it that.