The Body - No One Deserves Happiness (2016)

Nearing the end of 2016, the most brutal year on a personal and cosmic level I have ever lived through, cold and isolated in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, this album is what I need to not die right now. I feel just as jacked up as this album looks and sounds. The harsh orchestral pounding noise is comforting. The plaintive vocals warily draw me in, the poisoned dance rhythm trax are the carriage and the accentuation. This album knows the world is a heavy place that none of us will survive, not even the world itself. Death Disco on a colossal scale. Like when you are scrolling through your phone and you see that hundreds of puffins have died in a matter of months or 80,000 reindeer due over a 7 year period, the puffins and the reindeer starving to death, connected but forever separate, joined now in looming extinction. To live in a world in which mass extinctions are just another news item to scroll past, to forget as the next catastrophe rises to blot out the memory of the one just prior and the one receding before that. We live in a world in which atrocity and policy are one and the same, not directed to any specific end, other than their own, because it is possible, because it gives the wielder of atrocity a brief sense of lulz, a brief flash of power in a world of ever-greater distributed and lessening agency. Our agency is constrained or amplified by the use of agency of those who have come before us just as the use of our agency will constrain or amplify those who come after.