Have A Nice Life played Great Scott – 8/30

Genre-hopping Connecticut collective Have A Nice Life headlined a late-night show at Great Scott on Friday, with support from locals Minibeast and The Fake Boys. 

Just a few weeks after catching them in Vegas, of all places, I was happy to have another opportunity to spend some time with the not-so-frequent-to-tour Have A Nice Life. They sounded great on the towering stage at the Mandalay Bay House of Blues, but the right way to see a dark, enigmatic band with a dedicated cult following will always be the grimy confines of someplace like Great Scott.

It was a late one on Friday, with the sludgy noise-pop of Lowell’s Fake Boys hitting the stage just after the 10 p.m. doors. Prog-y experimentalists Minibeast followed up, engrossing a sold-out crowd with psych-damaged grooves and the weirdly magnetic stage presence of Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott (who cedes the kit to the regularly awe-inspiring Keith Seidel in this project).

Have A Nice Life got their start well after midnight, and played a powerful set ’til damn near the 2 a.m. bar’s-closing curfew. Led by co-founders Tim Macuga and Dan Barrett, but currently expanded to a six-piece unit, the band sounded massive as they surveyed a catalog that spans just two records, but feels much deeper than that. (Their feverishly beloved Deathconsciousness does run nearly 90 minutes, in all fairness).

Macuga and Barrett’s omnivorous approach to songwriting lands somewhere in the realm of industrial-slowcore-post-punk, but draws influence from plenty of other corners too. And for as much as the band’s recorded output can sound like transmissions from a distant plane, all wrapped in haunted reverb, they bring these songs bristling to life on stage. Which is to say, the night’s energy was much more punk rock catharsis than depressive shoegazing.

Alongside a generous number of cuts from Deathconsciousness and its 2014 followup The Unnatural World, the band also previewed a few from their just-announced third LP, Sea of Worry. Naturally, the crowd that stuck around into the wee hours of the morning already seemed to have the lyrics down for a title track released just a few days prior.

Check out a gallery from all three bands below.