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.
2025 releases
the armed, the future is here and everything needs to be destroyed what do you call this category of album where an artist goes back to what they were supposed to be doing in the first place and you can’t tell if they’re not doing it as well anymore or if you’re merely no longer interested? this feels to me like the armed’s pivot from the carnivalesque tao of the dead to the more straight-faced lost songs now that they’re evidently no longer pretending to want to be on workout playlists or whatever all of that stuff was. given that their original thing was a different form of being-nuts, this record feels like a return to that chaotic form with what i can only assume is a more radically political focus—the song feat. prostitute is really great in particular. wait, i have a better analogy: it’s like when those wimpy comedy guys get jacked for a bunch of marvel movies and then try to go back to comedy.
debby friday, the starrr of the queen of life one way of looking at this would be that the creator of one of my favorite releases via my go-to freak noise-rap label has begun making a bid for hyperpop star status by earnestly embracing elements of EDM and dubstep, but another way of looking at it is that it still mostly comes across as weirdo club music, as previewed by lead singles produced by darcy baylis. more tonal whiplash between the pop ballads and the prior debbie material than her last album had, but i was heartened to hear her regress to full-on bitchpunk mode four tracks in.
mares of thrace, the loss pretty varied sludge album that lands somewhere between the freaked-out, morbid storytelling of couch slut and julie christmas’ pairing of haunted-doll vocals and atmospheric metal. giving it a year before a major pop star does an album structured around the stages of grief even though it’s just about a breakup or whatever.
older albums
sungaze, this dream (2021) kind of a misleading name considering these shoegaze songs all sound like muggy nights or overcast mornings. this album’s twangy psychiness frequently makes it sounds like a more dream-pop-inspired besnard lakes, only without that distinctly canadian-indie-rock sensibility of having a really big band or making music that feels like overcompensation for not having a really big band.
teen suicide, it’s the big joyous celebration, let’s stir the honeypot (2016) a dozen or so kind of boring songs and, much more importantly, a dozen or so of the best songs this band has ever produced, balanced between the morbid lo-fi slacker rock of their origins and all the blissy noise pop and post-industrial noise they’d soon get into with american pleasure club (still waiting on a full LP of piano-rock stuff like “long way down”—sounds like at least one era of trail of dead, speaking of multiple eras of trail of dead). i’m gonna be honest, waiting four years for an album only for it to be 26 songs is a bit like waiting 40 minutes for the bus only for two to show up.
movies
for your consideration dir. christopher guest (2006) this movie accurately captures a decade of hollywood when indies were suddenly eclipsing major studios during awards seasons, leading to the formation of short-lived imprints like paramount vantage and warner independent (this movie itself was distributed by the latter) in hopes of achieving underdog status. beyond that observation (and cameos from actors familiar to nearly every major network sitcom of this era) i don’t think any of this really feels of-its-time—rather than accurately satirizing these types of movies, it instead just slowly reveals to us that the chris guest brand had begun to lose its polish by this point (was it still funny in 2006 to say “interwebs”? was it pushing it to have about a dozen other similar punchlines about middle-aged people not understanding internet technology?). as always fred willard is a bright spot, inexplicably cast here as a billy bush type rocking fauxhawk and earring.
the iron claw dir. sean durkin (2023) movie about the tragedies that will probably befall you if you treat all of your buff children with hobbit haircuts like pokemon. i know it’s annoying to read the teary brothers wrestling movie as anything but a teary brothers wrestling movie, but i happen to be reading a book about vietnam syndrome and america’s perceived crisis of masculinity in the ’80s and it’s hard not to focus on how pro wrestling’s false feats of strength and overly theatrical scripted conflicts (here even carried out in the name of god) mirrored reagan’s diplomacy at home—especially after we watch the von erich patriarch glower at a wimpy jimmy carter preventing our boys from competing in moscow. some pretty silly biopic cliches, but for the most part i think durkin did a good job of making this story about much more than just a single family that undeniably did endure an unfathomable succession of losses far more devastating than any that take place within the ring (he even omitted from the script a whole other brother who died of suicide), instead making each son’s fate a different dead end in the father’s search for an impossible masculine ideal that never quite materialized during that decade.
pray TV dir. rick friedberg (1980) pretty specifically the plot of UHF if that movie’s vague antagonism towards CEOs was applied to the more specific capitalist grift of televangelism. seems to overlook any real satire of this natural result of religion and TV operating under similar dictates of a nebulous entity that’s always seemed to be interpreted in bad faith, instead playfully hinting at the grim national future about to unfold where christian messaging within the medium would begin to explicitly shape successful news networks before ending on a very christian note of forgiveness towards the entity whose bottomless greed has just deprived the network’s employees of their livelihoods. hard to believe a movie boasting this much cred among the ’80s new wave scene (devo, paul reubens) and ’70s cult figures (dr. john, a screenplay by nick castle) has so little to show for it, with most of the humor embracing national lampoon’s punching-down tendencies (much like the writers of animal house, the filmmakers appear to be genuinely terrified of black people). the only saving grace is the very-UHF interstitial commercials and clips of the networks’ shows, though like any christian media the scope of those ideas is severely limited by its source material.
TV
high maintenance (2016-2020) fascinating time capsule of 2010s culture that manages to not only subvert every trope known to the millennial sitcom and use stoner comedy as the unlikely vessel with which to present something that’s both profound and deeply human (not to mention entirely incidental to drug use), but also presents an honest portrait of brooklyn hipsterdom that barely makes me wince. can’t recall the last series i’ve been introduced to that felt like a comfort watch on first viewing, with its mostly post-trump timeframe clearly inspiring it to skew further towards the wholesomeness found in the vimeo series it succeeded than the apathy (if not downright derision) of something like the comedy that clearly exists within that same universe. one thing i liked about the web series was the way it could end at any moment, given that there were no time constraints for its free-flowing narratives and preference for punchline over resolution, and the compounded episodes of the HBO show mostly keep that feeling in tact while adding a hyperlinked-storyline element that works really well. basically spider-man 2 levels of “new yorkers banding together” here, with the actual reasoning behind this sentiment mostly kept just out of frame.