Genius #16: Apr '25

Larry Michaels

01 May 2025 • 14 min read

Man, things are not good on planet earth. I don't know. Happy May Day tho!

The tunes are hot & the takes are hotter. Take: I think March was one of the best months for new releases in a long while. I'm truly, legitimately thrilled to share 8 (EIGHT) new albums today. I also did a full listen-through of The Body's discography which was intense but helped me pick out a top-5 for the replay zone. Please clap, that shit was nuts. Plus, in April I got to see Mount Eerie play their brains out.

OK let's sink into it.

Capitalism

One year glow-up of the garden (ft cryptid LL)

I have to give it up to LL for scouting it all out & being the brains behind the operation, but the big purchases this month were all farming related. Anyone who knew me when I lived in Portland will remember my previous life as a Stardew Valley cosplayer. For the Baltimore ranch, we purchased native wildflower starts, veggie seeds, raised beds, garden tools, and soil – then transformed our backyard into a garden. Got a late start on growing season, but just a couple weeks, so hoping for a decent yield. Soil hasn't been delivered yet, but that's the plan for the first weekend in May.

For starts, we picked out shade tolerant natives (phlox, wild strawberry, asters, goldenrod) and some sunnier ones (black-eyed susans, bee balm, bergamot). For seeds, we did what we could to find non-fascist seed companies. Ended up getting most of ours from SeedSavers. We're planting all manner of tomato, pepper, salad green, herbs, beans, spring onions, carrots. I'm looking forward to giving a pole bean update in the summer. Come by the house if you want a fresh tomato.

Album Recommendations

A true This-Is-Sparta Gerard Butler 8-pack of great albums that all came out in the past 2 months. I am fucking thrilled. Let's dig in.

YHWH Nailgun - 45 Pounds (AD 93, Mar '25)

strangled and snarled dancy noise rock

Minimalist noise rock – but look elsewhere for screeching feedback, the instrumentation is mostly a drum kit (+a mash of roto toms hits!) and 2-octave up bent-out-of-shape guitar stabs. Synth squelch brings the bass bass and vocalist Zack Borzone groans and sweats on this thing. Sounds like he's being actively strangled while performing – each word, painful and scraped against the back of his throat. The guitar tones are out of this world, some of the best sounding fucked up guitars I've heard. Kinda Palm, kinda Xiu Xiu, kinda Liquid Liquid, kinda Death Grips. Bigger than the sum of its parts. Visionary shit.

Cross Record - Crush Me (Ba Da Bing!, Mar '25)

Goopy psych-folk experiments

Solo artist Emily Cross breathes so much life into these songs: Masterful recording & mixing through dizzying song constructions, and to top it off her lyrics and vocal performance fit perfectly. There's tons of funky digital fingerprints here, but all of the instrumentation is (or seems) analog: swirling vocal samples jump out of the side channels, buzzy acoustic guitars, sunny upright bass chimes through chords, crispy lofi drums sound absolutely huge and are panned in an insane way. If you're into stuff like The Microphones, this is a special release. Plus, the frog on the cover – look at this guy!

More Eaze & claire rousay - No Floor (Thrill Jockey, Mar '25)

humid ambient

Nighttime ambient from two mages spinning a midwestern summer spell. Applebee's parking lot off the interstate, moths all lit up in the floodlights; air thick with a would-be thunderstorm that just won't break. The instrumentation is varied between digital and analog: crunchy acoustic guitars, pedal steel that sounds like it's been piped in from a church, multitracked viola, all punctuated by robotic blips & bloops and field recordings. Nothing "lofi" here. The compositions are emotionally charged & tracks will suddenly change atmosphere in delightful ways. Everything pushing towards a higher plane.

Imperial Triumphant - Goldstar (Century, Mar '25)

disgusting & opulent black-death metal

The idea to start a Jazz Age NYC themed metal band is something that would have never crossed my mind. It's a perfect backdrop for gnarly riffs that flip from blackened shredding to deathy riffage, all filtered through bizarre jazz changes. Filthy walking basslines, chaotic drumming, noise-rock infected guitars, occasional horns. The title track sounds like an Ink Spots vocal pop commercial and is bookended by songs "NEWYORKCITY" (47seconds of grind, featuring Bloody Panda vocalist Yoshiko Ohara) and "Rot Moderne" a full on full on blacked prog freakout that descends into a stomach-churning breakdown. Honestly so sick.

FACS - Wish Defense (Trouble In Mind, Mar '25)

Ceremonial post-punk mantras

Impressive minimalist writing and a clinic in how a simple composition can be expanded on to bring intrigue – and a perfect example of how the sound of the recording can push the songs forward.^[1] Easy to drink deep and get lost in these tracks. The soundstage is split evenly between giant room-mic drum sounds, chorus-infected bass lines halfway up the neck, and guitars with tones that are flick between bright or woozy or chiming or scraggly. Vocal delivery is deadpan and dry, hovering just over the rest of the band, with intriguingly spare lyrics. This album only has 7 songs, but I am intensely jealous of each one.

Is this the last album ever to be recorded by Steve Albini? ↩︎

T Gowdy - Trill Scan (Constellation, Mar '25)

madrigal computer

What a treat – hypnotic combo of medieval choir music & hypermodern ambient. Most tracks feature claustrophobic polyphonic voices crammed in between buzzy synth bass, clicky arpeggiators, spacey drum machines. Gowdy even busts out a lute (!!) – crispy and close mic'd so you can hear every scrape of the plectrum, but don't worry, it's awash in tonal reverb & glitchy sympathetic harmonies that get farther from their source as the composition continues. Come on!!! A record full of lush digital soundscapes, but you have to click past a bunch of pop-up ads. Answers the age old question: "What if the MRI machine wants to sing?"

Alabaster Deplume - A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole (Int'l Anthem, Mar '25)

sweetly soft third-way jazz

Deplume's vision of freedom and healing is eloquently laid bare on the record. His spitty & shaky sax is pregnant with emotion – every line sounds like he's both holding back a well of emotion & trying to let just enough through to bring you into his world. Sublime stuff – all that is solid truly melts into air. The spoken word & sung parts are.. well, they're interesting from an intellectual perspective and they.. sound fine. Let's not dwell on that. His recent work of recording music in Palestine clearly had an impact on these compositions – there's an element of "freedom at all costs" in here that I find makes for a rewarding listen.

Mantar - Post Apocalyptic Depression (Metal Blade, Feb '25)

Riffs, riffs, riffs

Hell yeah, dude. Sick noise rock, evil headbanger black 'n' roll shit that just simply rocks. Like a whole album of Rob Zombie's "Dragula." Huge riffs, gigantic drums, a throaty vocal delivery – the whole soundstage is filled up. What if Motorhead was still around & listened to more 90s black metal? Drum and guitar duo from Germany originally, though now split across the world. No bass guitar needed. Music for stomping around the house, making a ruckus.

Upcoming May albums:

Mongolian jazz singer Enji is releasing her follow-up to a steller 2023 record. Sonor is out on 5/2 on her own Squama label.
mclusky are back with their first album since 2004 – the singles are very Falco and a good time. Their 2nd record is an all-timer for me. the world is still here and so are we is out on the 9th on Ipecac.
It's not a secret that Brooklyn rapper billy woods is my favorite MC – his latest solo record GOLLIWOG comes out on 5/9 via his own Backwoodz Studioz label.
Ocean City grindlords Full Of Hell can't stop making records or they will die. Broken Sword, Rotten Shield is out on the 16th via Closed Casket. So stoked.
London chamber pop octet caroline are back with the aptly titled caroline 2. I loved loved loved their first one, excited to hear the follow-up on 5/30 courtesy of Rough Trade.

Replay - The Body

Are they the heaviest band in existence? Maybe! Certainly one of the strangest and most omnivorous. Providence-to-Portland polymath duo The Body take everything in & release a constant output of crushing, bizarre music. In their 20 years as a band, Chip King and Lee Buford have released 25 albums, but only 8 under their own name. The other 17 are collaborations with other artists – but even the 8 "canon" releases often include featured performers. The band makes complicated references to literature, wears t-shirts for reggae artists, cites old time & rag music as favorites. But nearly constant throughout the timeline: girthy guitars, Buford's gigantic drums (fun fact: ex-Blue Man Group), filthy hip hop & noise post-production techniques, vocal samples of suicidal monologues, and King's chilling birdcall howls.

I've selected a handful of favorites (chronologically):

The Body & Assembly of Light Choir - All The Waters of the Earth turn to Blood (2010)

The band's output started in 2004, but their earliest records are hard to dig up. Their 2010 album is the earliest album readily available on streaming services [ed note, as of April 22, this is no longer true, this album has too been removed from streaming services]. Half of the songs feature polyphonic choir vocals, the other half lay a groundwork for future releases: while King's vocal delivery isn't quite refined, it's more varied as he tries using his voice in a few different ways. The drum patterns show off some hip hop influence, but mostly stick to the heavy-hitting doom. Really cool to hear how their sound evolves from here.

The Body - I Shall Die Here (2014)

A perfect LP if you're into dark and cut-up glitchy metal. Horror movie soundtrack composer The Haxan Cloak completely recut their album & added gnarly synth sequences. The synth elements bring just enough brightness in & the songs have been chopped up into an abstract impression of music. I love this record. The song "Hail To Thee, Everlasting Pain" is a masterpiece of the genre. Last year, they released the original recordings too as a double LP, I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant.

The Body & Full Of Hell - One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache (2016)

EUGH this one is heavy as fuck, both bands push their boundaries into an industrial hellscape where drums are pistons and everything gets smashed between the gears. There's so much weird processing in the songwriting; fucked up gated snares, undersampled drum cymbals, sampled-and-resampled vocals, the sound of wobbly speaker cones. The opening track on this is an absolutely terrifying, totally unhinged way to open a record. Violent & unhinged.

The Body - I Have Fought Against It And I Can't Any Longer (2018)

One of the single most pessimistic records I've ever heard. Completely in the shadow of nihilism. The title is a direct quote from Virginia Woolf's suicide note. More hip-hoppy than their other albums – featuring weird 808 kicks, hip hop synths & strings, guest vocals from Lingua Ignota & Uniform's Michael Berdan who duet screaming the album title over and over on the 2nd to last song. And that's BEFORE the final spoken word track that makes my heart go black, where a dour man repeats: "I've reached the peak of emptiness and everything hurts."

The Body - I've Seen All I Need To See (2021)

More of a noise album than anything else, this is a clinic in distorted tones & overloaded consoles. Fizzy guitars clip the very edges of reason, there's almost no depth to perceive here: everything is at the very front of the soundstage. It's like listening to the band live, but with your head jammed into one of the speaker cones. Closing track "Path Of Failure" devolves into a free jazz drum solo freakout. This is the album of theirs that I revisit the most, so I suppose that makes it my favorite.

The Body & Big|Brave - Leaving None But Small Birds (2021)

Here's an unexpected one! The only The Body album that ISN'T a metal album. Both bands show off their old time & bluegrass influences and wrote a droning Appalachian death folk that shambles forward, featuring originals & re-imaginings of classic rags. Like nothing else in their discography & honestly like little else that I've heard before.

The Body & Dis Fig - Orchards of a Futile Heaven (2024)

I struggled to pick one of the later The Body albums to include here – I think this is one that brings the most variation to the above. Dis Fig's emotional and dynamic vocal delivery is a great addition to the band & the forgoing of guitars in favor of gnarly synths/noise circuits is a great change-up for the sonic palette. It's a shot in the arm for a genre that tends to retread in on itself. What makes The Body such a special band is their willingness to constantly seek new ground and find new ways to incorporate influences.

Scene Report

Mount Eerie & Hana Stretton - The Atlantis (4/20)

I missed the first opener Precious Bane, but was glad to catch Hana Stretton's quiet and contemplative set. She barely raised her voice above a whisper and seemed allergic to using the on-stage mic, occasionally asking the sound team to crank the field recordings so that she could be correctly lost in the mix. Listening to her album from last year, I would say that the effect absolutely nailed what it is like to listen to her music. Listen for yourself down below! Lovely stuff & I was completely transported to her Australian outback farm while in the crowd. She barely touches the guitar, kicking a cajon in rhythm, and just letting the field recordings dictate the flow songs. I got the distinct sense from her stage banter that she wanted nothing more than to leave the United States of America. Girl, same.

Hana Stretton's spare sound on full display!

As for Mount Eerie's set, I think this is the happiest I've ever seen Phil Elverum. A winding and compassionate set that was mostly made up of songs from Night Palace, but with a couple extras. A simple stage set up of drums, bass, organ-ish keys/backing vox, and Phil on guitar/vocals made for a ragged and lean quartet. The songs came through perfectly with the stripped-down group, bringing immediacy to the tracks with ornate studio trickery like "I Heard Whales (I Think)" and "I Spoke To A Fish." On the former, Elverum busted out some kind of wind instrument and made the whale call himself, which felt honestly kind of special.

The long stereolab intro for this one really comes through!

Phil's words continue to work their way through me. It's clear that he's grappled with the way that his music has been interpreted and he used Night Palace as an opportunity to demonstrate that his hippie naturalistic Zen songwriting & hyperreal grieving are part of a decolonialist vision for a world of harmony that is in dialectical combat with wealth and the death cult of the US. The set construction included the 12min spoken word "Demolition" where he struggles with meditating only to find comfort, and the sneering "November Rain" which specifically targets the wealthy who "park their money" in Elverum's Puget Sound.

The lyrics of the last song of the night (and last song on the record), "A Stone Woman Gives Birth At Night" have been rattling around my head all week: "I never meant to pretend there's another world apart from this one that we're in / But I was briefly adrift in a night sky."

Our Youtube friend is not familiar with the Mt Eerie song "Voice In Headphones"

The set also included 1 country cover & a Nirvana cover (???) But this was the moment in the night that I flipped the fuck out – I am the voice that yells "WOO" when I realize that he's playing "Voice In Headphones" from 2008's Dawn (or 2008's Lost Wisdom). Maybe my favorite Mt Eerie song & Phil is loathe to play old material. An unexpected moment for a beautiful tribute to the power of music (and Bjork) and what it (she) can do for us in moments when we need it most. What an absolute treat!

Upcoming Shows

Baltimore

5/1 (Thu) Argentinian Turnable & Synthesizer @ Normals
5/4 (Sun) Napalm Death & The Melvins @ Soundstage
5/4 (Sun) Nuvolascura, Life, Julia Set @ Metro
5/5 (Mon) Nada Surf @ Ottobar
5/8 (Thu) Roger C Miller (from Mission of Burma) @ Normals
5/15 (Thu) Waverly Main St. - Trinidad & Tobago, Baltimore Steel Orchestra @ corner of 32nd & Brentwood
5/31 (Sat) Full of Hell, Harm's Way, Jarhead Fertilizer @ Baltimore Soundstage
5/31 (Sat) The Body, Sunrot, Crawler @ The Undercroft

DC

5/3 (Sat) Tim Hecker @ Black Cat
5/21 (Wed) Squid @ Black Cat

NYC

5/3 (Sat) Steve Lyman, BlankFor.ms, Donny McCaslin @ Ki Smith Gallery
5/8 (Thu) Krallice @ The Broadway
5/9 (Fri) Oneohtrix Point Never, Nala Sinephro, Two Shell, etc. @ Knockdown Center
5/16 (Fri) YHWH Nailgun, DJ E @ Elsewhere

Future Shows

6/7 (Sat) Young Widows, Rid of Me, Kal Marks @ Metro (Baltimore)
6/7 (Sat) Perfume Genius @ 9:30 Club (DC)
6/8 (Sun) JPEGMAFIA @ Baltimore Soundstage (Baltimore)
6/10 (Tue) John Wiese, Lana Del Rabies, Jeff Carey @ Metro (Baltimore)
6/13 (Fri) Astrid Sonne @ Current Space (Baltimore)
6/23 (Mon) GY!BE @ 9:30 Club (DC)
6/25 (Wed) Femi Kuti @ 9:30 Club (DC)