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
bed, everything hurts queer german dream pop that often sounds like what seefeel would’ve had to sound like if i didn’t feel lied to about quique being a shoegaze album. kinda reminds me of that slim0 record from last year in the sense that it’s so long and winding and european and i have so little context for it that i don’t really even know what the band would classify themselves as—“loser” is pretty explicitly post-punk-inspired, while the track that intros it is eerie spoken-word about scoring BJs in a park?
greet death, die in love not sure if this one congeals as well as news low and hell did for me, but still always impressive to hear how well they connect the dots between each disparate ’90s alt-rock subgenre that was mutually fueled by coming home from your stupid job so exhausted that the only solutions that present themselves are self-annihilation or profound love. certainly grateful for “country girl,” at the very least—in classic greet death fashion i feel the need to stop what i’m doing and read along to the lyrics every time i hear it, with lines like “everyone’s always trying to do smalltown shit / we hit the liquor store and went to KFC” somehow feeling revelatory to me.
mizmor & hell, alluvion i swear i’m still a fan of mizmor even if my favorite song of his by far is that portugal. the man cover he did a few years ago because apparently he’s cousins with their singer? not very familiar with hell—mostly because every time i look at their digital albums on bandcamp they’re each $9,999—but this feels like a more seamless collaboration than mizmor’s record with thou. i like the ambient dog snarling (?) in the outro. i also like how for the album cover they were like “let’s just do that bnny sleeve but make it funereal doom metal.”
regal cheer, quite good apparently i can only listen to pop-punk now if it’s extremely british or made by a $uicideboy, and i feel like years of jeff rosenstock and PUP fandom are somehow culpable for bringing me to this unexpected place. not quite as immediate or consistent as their debut, but it’s certainly no unraveling of regal cheer the band despite the unexpected twee interlude’s best efforts.
tropical fuck storm, fairyland codex i still associate this band with that “name one thing in this picture” meme after their debut album cover invoked it, and i think it’s remained a relevant illustration of their sound (i just caught their live show and their nearly funk-rock rhythm section makes it sound like they’ve been trapped in some barbarian-esque basement setup with nothing but freaky styley and qanon message boards). not only is that debut’s cover art aesthetic replicated here, but also a refocus on that era’s post-blues-punk after weirdo forays into thumpy psych-drone and marathon hendrix covers. with every new release it becomes funnier to me that this band toured american casinos with modest mouse.
older albums
the cure, songs of a lost world (2024) after five years or so of doing a running bit on FLOOD where we’d link all of our news stories detailing robert smith’s seemingly empty promises that the new cure record would be announced any day now every time he made another one, i had zero faith it would ever materialize, let alone hit this incredibly hard—you can hear the patience this was made with throughout every song, rather than the band merely quickly cashing in on this current era of pop music pairing somber lyrics with upbeat compositions. something very eerie about smith still sounding like a twentysomething singing these miserable songs about mortality, and it occurred to me that he successfully achieved the legacy-reboot ideal of making characters look like they haven’t aged at all over the past 40 years—yet at the same time it also reminds me of twin peaks: the return in how bluntly it faces the massive block of time that’s passed since they first hit the peak of their fame. “alone” had me instantly hooked—gotta be the most devastating song about peek-a-boo ever written.
duckboy, existential hymns for the average sigma (2023) apparently i can only listen to pop-punk now if it’s made by a $uicideboy or is extremely british, and i am now fairly certain that years of jeff rosenstock and PUP (and maybe a little militarie gun) fandom are definitely culpable for bringing me to this unexpected place. really enjoying these tiny capsules of voicemail-themed pop-punk—wish ruby would put $boy$ on the back burner for a bit to expand these releases beyond 10 minutes or so.
movies
afire dir. christian petzold (2023) thrilled to welcome petzold’s first-ever subject who was probably interested to see what consequence of sound had to say about the new car seat headrest album. really great coming-of-age-as-an-artist story about learning to not only create from experience, but also to have experiences before you try to do so—not particularly an original concept, but really great in the way it’s delivered here through what feels like a teens/older-woman sex comedy even before the object(s) of desire enter the picture (i really thought there was at least a decade age gap between the two leads, but as the movie progresses it became clearer that he was older than i’d thought and she younger—chalk that up to perfect casting, i guess). it’s so odd to see a period-drama director craft what could very easily be a conventional romcom if at any point the novelist character stops being a weenie who thinks he needs to wear all black to the beach and turns down snickers ice creams, his refusal to do so slowly reshaping this into a tragedy about fumbling a career, a romance, and friendships new and old like a dad in a tupperware infomercial. not entirely sold on the quite literal storybook ending after we get the sense that he fumbled telling his own story, too, as a newly introduced narrator enters the picture, but overall appreciate this as an expression of how un-self-serious petzold strives to be as an artist.
mom and dad dir. brian taylor (2017) post-louis CK blunt airing of grievances with offspring that frankly gets very weird when its gender-binary infrastructure alludes to the fact that moms envy their teen daughters’ bodies and dads get horny when thinking about their sex lives. seems to have been devised as disposable theater fare for any couple able to secure a babysitter, despite most of its midlife crisis energy appealing to the (tim allen grunt) male faction of that demographic—i’m thinking the ’70s exploitation-film title sequence and crank-ily shot cinematography with what can best be described as dubstep-inspired editing, which mostly eclipses the live-laugh-love interior decor and humor that’s largely reliant on jokes about teens getting mad about about moms saying “hashtag” and “facebooking,” which ironically scans as dialogue written to appeal only to parents. if it has any redeeming quality it is, of course, cage, who delivers a performance familiar to a recent history of approving insane scripts before fully realizing how vapidly they’d be approached, responding by giving us something vaguely entertaining for what seems like two days max on set.
pasolini dir. abel ferrara (2014) hate me a biopic—and fines are doubled when its subject is an art-film director who was perpetually told his ideas went too far only to later be widely celebrated—though i suppose this gets a pass since it’s more of a final-slice-of-life portrait dovetailed into the spiritual realm of pasolini’s final unrealized script idea (plus it’s late-era ferrara, so lord knows it’s inscrutable, or at the least very tough to scrute). i think its MO is pretty clearly stated, though, in dafoe-as-pasolini’s early assertion that narrative art has been eclipsed by the relationship between the author and their form, the result of that here being that viewers walk away with a few stunning near-surrealist images and vague philosophical questions swilling in their heads rather than clues in the cinematic murder-mystery pasolini’s death invites. i wonder if the actually-italian biopic from two years later that takes this precise final-24-hours approach is this confusing.
the servant dir. joseph losey (1963) british new wave parasite that’s also about the anxiety of getting married before you ever have a chance to live with a really fun roommate. there’s nothing explicitly funny about this movie, but i love how it opens with the purely bourgeois dilemma of not being compatible with your fiance’s butler, as if he’s going to become your stepson, before suddenly pivoting from stuffy romantic drama to psychological-surrealist territory when said butler begins teaching his master about free love. i know the rules were a little different outside of america, but 1963 still seems a little early to hear a movie character casually say “you fucking bitch”?
books
ladders to fire by anais nin (1946) commendable in being a predecessor to a decade’s worth of cocky literature by bohemian dirtbags dragging the women they’ve seduced and abandoned through all of their future relationships as messily as possible, written from the woman’s perspective, though it does ultimately seem to paint lesbianism as nothing more than a hail mary prelude to suicide. lands in the danger zone of being extremely progressive as a work of feminism from the tail end of the era that begat virginia woolf and suffragism and a bit regressive in our current era of being very tired of hearing about how bad your tinder date with a man went (evidently i’ve picked an annoying moment to start reading anais’ fiction?). not particularly engaging as a work of prose, but i also don’t think most of the poetic descriptors that make up the bulk of the book particularly mean anything?