notes: may 2026 (pt. 3)
police department james
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.
2026 releases
lip critic, theft world all i could ask of a digital hardcore band is that they exude the insane energy of these slop-era AI slot machine app commercials—i don’t think lip critic even needed to include “jackpot” here to achieve that given the surrealist sense of overstimulation that comes before and after it. somehow much sillier and much angrier than their debut to reflect the much sillier and much angrier world we’re living in two years later, though all the electro-punk trickster stuff remains very much in tact. they did a piece on their non-musical influences for FLOOD and incomprehensibly cited tim duncan as inspo rather than, like, lance stephenson.
main era, IV of wands is to post-hardcore what horse jumper of love is to slowcore (and, because it’s 2026, also features a nu-metal rhythm section—i’ll allow it this time). i’m interested to dive into their back catalog, though somehow i have no idea what i’ll find based on the breadth of directions explored on this fairly proggy four-song LP. i like how “double dragon” is thematically just “sunbather.”
nara’s room, tearless, thoughtless i remember having a hard time describing this band when i wrote about their first album a few years ago, but this one makes it clear that all you really need to know about them is that they were trapped inside of a DVD player between the years 2003 and 2023 and have very mixed feelings about getting out. i guess in a sense it’s refreshing to hear them lean out of the turn-of-the-millennium genre influences that made up their debut, though it doesn’t really feel like they’ve replaced it with anything besides a more transparent nostalgia for being so engaged with an episode of lizzy mcguire that your bladder nearly bursts. lots of cool sound effects in dolby digital, though.
slift, fantasia maybe i shouldn’t be surprised at this point, especially after listening to ummon earlier this month, but this album features yet another significant shift in style that once again pretty transparently lifts from yet another oh sees era—this time the raspy punk vocals dwyer has started doing lately. given that that sort of signaled the end of my devotion to that band, i’m glad that it isn’t quite as grating to me here, though it’s still a pretty significant step down from ilion, which is one of the most locked-in albums i’ve ever heard. i say this with nothing but respect, but i feel like this band is also filling the void in my heart left by muse post-symmetry.
older albums
armand hammer, furtive movements (2014) billy and elucid have always sounded exactly like this, but this seems to be their only joint release where the beats are uninspired enough (due in part to a few of the tracks being remixes) that AH doesn’t come across as particularly promising this early in their career. i think i mentioned this in the backwoodz-specific newsletter i sent earlier this year, but i love how “touch & agree” is essentially just a moodier companion piece to open mike eagle’s “advice raps,” which dropped that same year.
busdriver, roadkillovercoat (2007) not sure why the torrent of busdriver’s discography i downloaded in 2013 cut off at 2005, but i recently realized i basically had no idea what he got up to between black tangent and the argument with dreams EP nearly a decade later—apparently he briefly signed with an iconic punk/hardcore label to soft-launch his new, less nerdy persona under the umbrella of pre-N.A.S.A. nebulous indie-pop-party-rap that sort of dominated the free mp3s era (this was notably two years before he guested on themselves’ “party rap sucks”). pretty mixed bag here (including an acoustic-ballad closer?), and i can’t help feeling like the record’s defining facet is its lone guest feature being one of the members of cocorosie.
mamaleek, cadejos (2019) relentlessly fascinating project, as i’ve mentioned at least half a dozen times in this newsletter, that produces a sound that’s just as much a noise rocker’s take on metal as it is a blues rocker’s demented interpretation of louis armstrong’s vocals. barely even worth shouting them out again with regard to this brief three-song EP (plus a very nuts primus cover, if you’re listening to last year’s reissue), but i did really want to make note of the fact that the lyric sheet for the opening track and EP highlight just reads “hi.”
movies
cloud dir. kiyoshi kurosawa (2024) sets itself up to be another kurosawa horror-thriller about spirits entering the world through the internet in order to haunt the living before pivoting to a christmas carol-esque story about ghosts of temu sales past using forums as a hub for coordinating their malicious visits on the eve of another big listing. wasn’t particularly engaged with its foray into action until it begins to feel like a comedy during the climactic shootout when about a dozen guys who’ve never used a gun before square off. we also begin to see how the story’s antihero is equally useless outside of his business dealings as he sits back and lets everyone else do the work while he reaps the benefits. love how they brought back that distinctly early-’90s thing where action movies all ended with a hailstorm of bullets in a dimly lit and ambiguously industrial setting—which feels especially apt after several scenes of smarmy villains doing smarmy villain things rather than easily killing their target.
48 hrs. dir. walter hill (1982) specific type of two-hander where you know exactly what you’re in for based on who those two hands are. given that eddie murphy’s comic relief is mostly just deflecting some pretty hostile racism in the pairing’s not entirely un-shrek/donkey-like relationship, though, i mostly just enjoyed this as 90 minutes of the spectacle that is nick nolte: even when his hair is shampooed, and before his face became impossibly craggy, the man was already the embodiment of profound dishevelment—perpetually bleeding lip, ever-worsening relationship problems that never get resolved, pulling from flasks and cigs as everyone tells him he needs some rest, to which he always responds with indistinguishable pirate sounds—to the extent that it even manages to carry over to his car and the way he drives it. otherwise feels like a starkly segregated view of america in the ’80s where the white man is always policing the black man (“i’m just doing my job,” nolte says late in the movie apologizing for all the slurs, though we wonder whether he’s even referring to police work). adding a community note to that tweet about how there’s only one song about the boys being back in town.
stay hungry dir. bob rafelson (1976) pretty early indication that the new hollywood movement was heading off the rails as rafelson’s signature americana existentialism gets refit for a deeds-like protagonist and a screwball tone while the director is clearly still trying to express his reservations about our weird little pockets of culture getting snuffed out by capitalism and its roving gangs of real estate agents. which all adds up to kind of a thematic mess, with neither its zaniness or its allegorizing ever really making up for the bad vibes inherent to a film set where the director asks his actresses to take their tops off for no reason, its not-particularly-funny sense of humor, and a remarkably inconsistent southern drawl from the lead actor. i guess somewhere in there is a lesson about doing something big with your life, but there are just so many distractions along the way: arnold introducing a native alabaman to moonshine and fiddles, bob englund playing his idea of a normal guy, ed begley jr. being presented to us as having “zero defects.”
books
the children of men by P.D. james (1992) possibly the most realistic depiction of a pre-internet-age apocalypse i’ve ever encountered, where the real pandemic is a universal sense of apathy permitting only five people in all of the UK to want to run the country, and only five people seem willing to stand up to their authoritarianism. opens with the same scene the movie opens with—the reveal that the youngest person in the world has died a quarter century after humans have become infertile—and never really realigns with it as the narrative manages to mine even bleaker subject matter (theo’s backstory includes accidentally running over his baby with his car, for example). obviously nowhere near as white-knuckle without all the chase sequences and cinematographical feats, but its philosophizing is just as engaging as james meditates on men struggling to hold onto whatever scraps of power they can as everything else falls apart around them (there’s also plenty of theologizing: the end of the book is pretty transparently adapted from the gospels’ miracle conception in a wood shed). i like how the jumping off point for the narrative was basically just, “what if the hero never answers the call?”