The front and back cover is the Jacques-Louis David painting, La Mort de Marat, which has become-at least in my mind-iconic. It’s very well designed-the inside cover holds a painting, that seems to depict what could be an Antiocheanistic ritual, and a letter written by a prisoner to a child that, again, builds on the themes of death and everything that comes along with it. I paid a decent amount of euros to get this vinyl shipped over to the UK, and when it arrived a few weeks later, I sat in awe of it. It’s likely that Dan’s lyrics came first and the text was written to build on them, which means that the album can be enjoyed as a standalone piece, but I’d highly recommend the purchase of this LP if only to read this strange little book. At 70 pages, it’s a quick read and when timed right can be completed just before the end of the last track (‘ Earthmover’), concluding with the lyrics to the songs (and pictures in place of the ones without lyrics) that now ooze with context, rife with scripture and biblical meaning. There’s also a fair few references to the Salem Witch Trials, which cements a layer of reality into the story as it is just that: a completely made up story, written simply to build on the themes and concept created for the album. There’s a lot of blood, guts, fire, and ash, with descriptions of brutal suicides and murders that will weigh on your mind for days after completion. In short, death is the meaning, and the goal, of life. Written by an unnamed historian at the University of Massachusetts, On An Obscure Text tells the story of Antiocheanism, a religion and later cult whose main belief was that death equals truth and truth equals death. This text is not too dissimilar to a lore book you would find attached to something like Lord of the Rings-except much darker. This journey is built on by the booklet, and indeed what secures it as a highly considered concept album, included with purchases of physical copies of the album. It would be unnatural to press the shuffle button when each song so effectively flows into the next like pages into chapters, with each segue only drawing you further into its story.
Coming back to it now some two years later, I still follow the same pattern I have to listen to it from start to finish, or just not listen to it at all, because hearing it feels like reading a book. Suffice to say, for a good few months of that summer not a day went passed where I didn’t listen to the whole record, front to back. This album popped up in my YouTube’s suggested video section, so I played it in the background while working on some poetry, testing the waters. I discovered Deathconsciousness by Have A Nice Life-a band composed of Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga-just before I turned 20 I was in my second year of university, up to my ears in assignments and desperate to find music that I could write to. “We’re playing songs in a dead genre about believers in a dead religion,” Tim remarked, “who’s going to want to listen to that?” – taken from the foreword of On An Obscure Text
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