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
amenra, de toorn/with fang and claw not entirely sure i understand the politics behind simultaneously releasing two EPs which together are extremely album-length rather than simply dropping an album, but i can only assume given the fact that de toorn is more spacious, spoken-word, danish(?)-language metallic slowcore and with fang and claw is more shrieking, english-language sludge that the band is taking a page from the release cycle for the bravery’s 2007 LP the sun and the moon and testing to see which of the two lanes they frequent is more popular with listeners. i’ll bet you could guess my age within three years based on that reference.
the body & intensive care, was i good enough? the thing about the body is that they release so much material with so many different collaborators that sound enough like them that these joint LPs can seem indistinguishable, making it so that their fans can take them completely for granted while anyone who’s never heard a the body song before will be left sitting with what they’ve just listened to for the rest of their life. mostly middle-of-the-road for them, though the closer is one of the most evil things anyone has ever recorded.
imperial triumphant, goldstar quite possibly my favorite dissonant death metal album from the moment marshall mcluhan provides the intro. most distinct iteration of this deeply weird band’s aesthetic dialog between early 20th century art-deco expressionism and present day, you know, hell, which reminds me of basically every psychological-horror video game where malignant figures from the 1920s come back to haunt you through familial trauma or whatever (the title track pseudo-jingle even sounds like a song that would play ominously on a phonograph you encounter). the singer does french death-metal vocals so perfectly that i always forget he’s from…new york?
perfume genius, glory perfume genius dodging my disdain for overly earnest singer-songwriters suddenly deciding in 2025 that they’re actually alt-country musicians like that french guy dancing around lasers in ocean’s 12. realizing this is the first proper PG album i’ve heard since learning and even though i know this project veered into something more high-conceptually art-pop, this feels more like a natural evolution from that release nearly 15 years later (see: piano ballad “me & angel”) than a shallow recreation of currently-chic sounds. also, no lap-steel.
tunic, a harmony of loss has been sung been cool watching this band expand from tight hardcore-punk to whatever post-metal take on progging noise-rock this is over their past two albums, though it’s also hard to overlook the contrast in their always-self-assured earlier material and the fact that i’m not entirely sure they know what they’re doing here. i like when it sounds like the body (even feels like one of their album titles) or white suns, though the vocalist doesn’t really have the raving-monologue thing down quite yet.
vundabar, surgery and pleasure feel like i put undo pressure on this band for being the only quote-unquote indie-rock thing that formed after the aughts that i can get behind, and it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster as they jerk back and forth between the bouncy smells smoke stuff and monotonous/overly-serious post-punk—this is at least a decent compromise between the two. there’s some cool TOTBL noodling on the opener, but i just don’t understand why someone who has such immense power to go total-goof mode in a more recognizably franz-ferdinand way on every song would ever hold back.
older albums
bekor qilish, throes of death from the dreamed nihilism (2022) this is kind of what i imagine that new blood incantation album sounded like (proggy death metal yeeted into space with an aesthetically perfect album cover), but i guess i’ll never know for sure because i am a hater and naturally skeptical of any metal album that gets that much attention that isn’t also deafheaven. little bit of djent on here to spice things up, and i believe the guy is italian? so no relation to billie or finneas.
black mold, snow blindness is crystal antz (2009) full-on IDM album from the guy who produced women’s self-titled and public strain, released the year between women’s self-titled and public strain. opens like an instrumental chad vangaalen album—if not more innocuously—but gets pretty out-there in an occasionally venetian snares way by the time the song titles begin to be called things like “smoking rat shit” and “fuck ebay.” the duality of man or whatever.
flight, flight (2009) rare shitgaze project to have a bandcamp presence. despite it falling neatly within that genre’s all-too-brief lifespan i get the sense this was intended to be a mutation on the early castle face garage-rock scene instead. either way please make sure to turn your volume down several notches before hitting play.
titus andronicus, local business (2012) relic from an era when i really thought that hyper-literate was the future of rock and roll, long before i got a job editing statements from my favorite artists that just say “this was the first song we wrote for , the record, its about truama..” famously weak follow-up to something as beloved as the monitor, though credit them for going full-on heartland-rock before the killers made it universally acceptable, not to mention leaning into an americana aesthetic and doing songs about mental disorders well before those things became the norm. pretty sure be your own pet very specifically did the “minute-long punk song about food fights released by XL recordings” thing first, though.
movies
the beaver dir. jodie foster (2011) as far as i know this is just what the teds are (i assume with more radiohead and suicide attempts, though). can’t imagine it was any coincidence that this came out at the onset of the my strange addiction era, and its black-comedy aspirations feel just as exploitative whenever it becomes evident that the emotional support beaver puppet works as a stand-in for functional alcoholism. in a sense that central idea is handled delicately, as it’s padded out by a tragic subplot about how mental disorders (and/or stupidity) tend to be passed down generationally, with the disembodied voice of the puppet slowly revealing itself as the voice of a successful father disappointed in his son; there are parallel anti-capitalist cautionary tales about selling out one’s personal narratives for financial gain; there’s a throughline of family identifying signs of mental illness while the corporation that thrives off of that sickness looks the other way. it’s just hard to notice any of that when the movie opens by making light of an extremely dark situation with quirky tango soundtracking an alcoholic’s botched suicide and climaxes with objectively goofy imagery that’s meant to represent a violently split personality. also, were we really meant to sympathize with mel gibson in 2011?
fallen leaves dir. aki kaurismaki (2023) never really seem to connect with kaurismaki (maybe because i’m a cat person?), but i like the way he defines capitalism here as a series of predatory cycles one is either stuck inside of (made to feel depressed, giving way to addiction, giving way to feeling even more depressed) or stuck outside of (spending money you don’t have to use the computer required to get the job you need in order to pay for the computer) that make daily life so tedious that even the most lifeless of meet-cutes feels like they adheres shockingly well to generic romcom conventions. the humor wasn’t particularly for me aside from the incredible gag of intertextualizing your buddy’s instantly-forgettable zombie movie within a work otherwise littered with red-herring movie posters of european classics.
holland dir. mimi cave (2025) makes sense we’d finally get this familiar contrast of oop-country civility and film-noir plotting gone gruesomely awry a decade after it was initially supposed to go into development now that we’re on the brink of being able to type “fargo but it’s set where my grandma lives and co-stars the guy from that HBO series i watched” into the plagiarism machine. i was pretty engaged for the first hour or so but ultimately the plot twists and grotesque climax seemed catered to the true-crime docuseries crowd rather than to my interests—though i’ll admit it was fun to see nicole kidman having a mental breakdown a few stops on the pere marquette away from where joe pera lives. i can only assume they chose to vaguely set this at the turn of the millennium because midwest cities like this have become less quaint over the past decade or two due to microbrewery culture and e-tail and whatnot sanding down the distinctness of a place like holland, but i did appreciate that this setting invited representation for millennial protestant kids blasting raunchy rap music into their ears in the backseats of family cars.
running with scissors dir. ryan murphy (2006) much like every other teen-centric family dramedy from the 2000s i haven’t seen since high school and remember almost nothing about, this one deals with tenenbaums-esque dysfunction, depressive episodes, and a teenage boy shouting “why can’t this family just be normal,” though i can’t say any others feel this much like it originally aired during fox’s primetime block. kind of a variation on the needle-scratch-yep-that’s-me trope where the author-narrator opens by telling us no one will believe his story before introducing the stock abusive father character, the cliched manic-depressive and creatively-stifled-housewife mother (who always seems to be played by annette bening, oscar-worthily), and a familiarly ’70s trip down the pop-psychology rabbithole into a hippie madhouse, all furnished with era-appropriate music syncs and outfits. it all moves like a narrative but feels less propelled by an organized plot than by a set of vague themes and murphy’s smug satisfaction that his version of this movie we’d already seen a thousand time before by 2006 was rooted in truth, which he often reminds us of. also featuring brian cox on autopilot as manipulative, favorites-picking patriarch.
TV
northern exposure season 3 (1991) really bizarre how this show got scared into pivoting away from a variation on twin peaks into some centrist-intellectual pastiche of obscure medical terminology, philosophy, and quantum physics all woven together by a cast of characters who are nowhere near as progressive as the high culture the show touts might lead you to believe they are. there’s a bit more of the previous season’s character definition going on here—for better (chris being diagnosed as medically hot) or worse (maurice as capitalist archie bunker)—though this one feels more defined by the short-film-like episodes that generally work much better than the formulaic ones where somebody we’ve never heard of died and someone needs to tell flesihman who it is, or somebody we don’t know arrives in town and someone needs to tell shelly who it is, or holling needs to go out into the woods for some reason. maybe still worth it for all the seinfeld bit part cameos.