I am suspicious that the book could be a ruse meant to cover up the fact that all of these songs are intensely personal, but the lengths to which this duo went to cover that fact up is fairly astonishing.
Whether or not the book has anything to do with the album is questionable while direct lines can be drawn between the text in the book and the lyrics to some of the songs, it isn't clear which of the two came first. In addition to these odd contrasts, the band has gone through the trouble of producing a 70 page accompanying book supposedly written by a professor of religious anthropology and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Yet, despite all these severe devices, the band's name is Have a Nice Life and they title their songs like they're jokes: "Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail" and "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000" are perfect examples. The music itself is filled with sizzling guitars, massive and repetitive rhythms, echoing synthesizer effects, and dramatic melodies, both vigilant and resigned, that give the album an epic scope. The lyrics are not poetic nor are they sophisticated, but they aren't angst-ridden contrivances, either and they suit the macabre nature of the music very well. Organized as two distinct albums, Deathconsciousness is a sprawling record filled with suggestive lyrics about desperation, nihilism, failure, suffering, and the inescapable progress of time.
The music is excellent, but making sense of the rest of this monstrosity isn't easy. Composed over a five year period, Deathconsciousness was produced with only the most basic equipment, is accompanied by a 70 page booklet describing a dead religion, and features cover art ripped right from Jacques-Louis David's overtly political masterpiece, La Mort de Marat. Tim Macuga and Dan Barrett's musical project is as much an ambitious and frustrating piece of conceptual art as it is a crushing and soaring rock record.