biweekly newsletter listing all the music, movies, books, and, tv i, mike, have experienced for the first time over the past two weeks and also the things i have thought about them. again, i am mike.
**it has come to my attention that some of my emails are getting sent to readers’ promotions tabs on gmail, for which substack helpfully recommends that i “ask you to drag the emails back to the inbox.” i wouldn’t ask you to do such a thing on the Day of Rest, though i will still pass this information along to you.**
2025 releases
bruit ≤, the age of ephemerality the undeniable sounds of a post-internet -qatsi quite literally incorporating zuckerberg’s weasely little bitch voice (“this is the future you want to see” has never sounded more condemning) amid an otherwise fully-instrumental datascape of post-rock sound channeling both unthinkable progress and regress, providing glimpses of beauty and implying incredible harm. would be easy to crown this band the new GSY!BE if GSY!BE weren’t the new GSY!BE themselves. (full review)
club night, joy coming down understandably way less loopy than CN’s prior material given its focus on death, instead favoring nearly conventional post-punk—though the song structures still feel mathematically snakey and the vocals still feel like when a cat is up too high and won’t come down and it stresses you out a little bit, do you know what i mean?
downward, downward project that answers the fascinating prompt: what if a shoegaze band was worried? there’s usually some sort of statement being made in releasing multiple albums with the same name, but between dropping multiple self-titleds and also consistently putting out different versions of the same single, this is beginning to feel like tortured perfectionism. piglet ass oh-dear-oh-dear ass vocals.
gloin, all of your anger is actually shame (and i bet that makes you angry) if you were to throw all the post-punk groups on a chart where the sets of poles are “smart”/“dumb” and “cheeky”/“dour,” i don’t think i’d be remotely interested in any of the bands that weren’t crammed into the dumb/cheeky corner. i like the industrialist, noise-rock, and EBM (eh, close enough) stuff here, but to be honest it’s the immaturity of adding “69” to the end of a song title and the strung-out-fan interlude early in the tracklist that really make this special.
sumac & moor mother, the film two artists within the two very different pockets of music i devote most of this newsletter to covering for whom i have enormous respect, yet with few very notable exceptions can’t quite fathom the hype for. at best this sounds like a more avant-garde rage against the machine, weirdly (mostly just the closer), at worst it feels a little corny—though mostly it maintains the uncanniness of a provocative mashup project. big “danger mouse did WHAT” energy.
older albums
accelerant, accelerant (2024) opens sounding like a place to bury strangers doing oasis, closes with pavement/parquet-y slacker talk rock, everything else manages to fit neatly within whatever those two poles might be. mostly just some form of extremely fun noise-rock—my most boomer take is that we need fewer rock songs about overcoming trauma and more rock songs about scheming to bring down the club.
failure, magnified (1994) contains the vastly superior post-grunge song called “undone” of 1994, though i’m disappointed that nothing else on here comes remotely close to that peak. surprised the label didn’t force them to include that moody acoustic bonus track on the original tracklist considering the recent popularity of nirvana’s unplugged. also, wow, was that track actually recorded for the good son OST?
nia archives, silence is loud (2024) bought this on the strength of the title track/opener alone, pretty disappointed that the rest of the album exhausts the D&B instrumental while also putting more focus on the vocals which, to me, sound like those of a singer-songwriter whose CD is on sale at the starbucks checkout. she really went off with that columbo audio fancam track about lust, though.
bonus #content: went deep on all those TVotR side projects with “balloons” or “never” in the name
movies
passages dir. ira sachs (2023) tactfully made movie about tactlessness. grateful to be living at a time when a more bisexual and pro-antihero culture permits such innovative new ways to do love triangles, while the occupation of film director for this movie’s central destructive force both seems metaphorically sound (in a way, every production period must feel like its own individual lifetime) and true to life (how many filmmakers have an insane rolodex of exes?). lots of backs of heads perfectly lined up with faces in this, as if to cancel them out—i’ll bet that’s a metaphor, too, rather than just a recurring accident.
pride & prejudice dir. joe wright (2005) romantic fantasy about being chosen by the dourest, most disinterested boy whose parents also have the most money among the lineup of post-punk revival bands headlining bowery ballroom in 2005. never had much desire to learn more about jane austen’s canon of reversal-of-fortune romantic dramas, but honestly the overwhelming pleasantness of this one really hit when i saw it in theaters less than 24 hours after watching a procession of trailers for increasingly fucked-up and deeply stylized body horror movies i will almost certainly see immediately upon release ahead of sinners, not to mention the secondhand millennial nostalgia for media just beyond my scope of interest (easy to see how mr. darcy’s seemingly conscious hot-topic-codedness paved the way for ed cullen). also a really great cast here led, of course, by the hobbit dennis reynolds cousin.
sinners dir. ryan coogler (2025) from dusk till dawn remake with a way more sensible set of actors playing the brothers; live-action variation on american pop approaching the material considerably less eurocentrically. hinges around a really cool idea that’s also incredibly well visualized midway through the movie, i guess i just don’t understand why everything surrounding it needed to be so safe in terms of its weirdly balanced exposition, period-piece setting, and genre convention (really thought this might be the rare vampire movie that doesn’t feel the need to enlist a single character who understands the lore and dutifully recites it to us). that said i am grateful that “massacring racists” is quickly becoming a mainstream american movie genre, not to mention spike lee’s recent reminder that we’re all taking delroy lindo severely for granted.
TV
god save texas (2024) linklater’s unexpected take on on death row—obviously a very different perspective than herzog’s, given that he was raised in the capital punishment capital of the world rather than being an outside struggling to comprehend our national cruelty, not to mention his diaristic approach clashing with herzog’s instigative journalism. the other episodes feel a bit more instagram infographic-y in their narrative summation of truly horrifying information about black and brown neighborhoods being poisoned, harassed, and expelled from the communities they built from scratch, though linklater’s might be most striking given that it adds some truly bleak context to dazed and confused. also, in case you forgot that he’s not a hollywood filmmaker, there’s plenty of footage of him reconnecting with old friends from his high school football team named things like “jimbo.”