Death Spa – Ewwwphoria
(Self-released, March 2025)
I don’t know how to properly and thoughtfully approach a project that is heavily informed by—nay, founded upon—life experiences that are so different from my own as to be almost alien to me. As it turns out, this idea is actually sort of the point of Death Spa’s new album, Ewwwphoria. Knowing as I do the tiniest bit of background about Death Spa, it is the primary music project of Mia-Rose Malone, a trans woman based in the Pacific Northwest. Is this information relevant to the songs on Ewwwphoria? Absolutely, and the glorious cacophony is even better for it.
Though thunderous and thrilling and simultaneously tickling the “weird noise” and “shifty rhythms” funnybones, Ewwwphoria’s subject matter is every bit as heavy as its grooves. From the initial explosion of “Make It Hurt,” it’s clear that Mia-Rose and company are going to lay bare the facts with no punches pulled. “Our genocidal government wants trans people dead for being unlucky enough to have been born in the wrong body, I guess” is the sort of opening salvo that places the stakes front and center (and may already be the best first line of the year), but Death Spa do not step back from this line to see what the listener will do with it. Knowing the precedent is set, they barrel forward on pummeling-though-rhythmic drums, heavily-treated guitar (or maybe three of them, as they seem to be going in separate directions once or twice), and bass that moves the way one might picture an alligator or prehistoric lizard flexing its jaws.
If all of this presents “Make It Hurt” as some sort of monster, then I say mission accomplished—Death Spa clearly realize that it’s going to take something behemothic to rend the status quo limb from conservative limb and, while Mia-Rose expresses the desire to commit a concomitantly poetic and violent act in the successive lines, it almost goes without saying when she roars at the end, “Yeah, let’s make it hurt.”
Riveting in both essence and declaration, this hardly prepares one for the multifaceted anguish, terror, nightmares, victimization (with subsequent guilt), and body horror that any who have not experienced it firsthand (yours truly) can only imagine. I will confess that, even in my best attempts to understand, I could still never have come to the conclusion that being a trans person in America today might revolve less around emotional confusion and forced shame and more around self-disgust, nonstop defensiveness, and a pain that is both physical and psychic in nature. Dysphoria in its sundry manifestations informs practically every note and syllable, while it’s beaten back with each thump and crash of Jonathan Rodriguez’s frenetic percussion. Mia-Rose’s squiggly squalls and serpentine riffs escalate the primal fury of both her body’s war against itself and her own war against detractors and gaslighters, and she gets solid support from Levi Fuller’s bass lines as they excavate streets, smash through walls, and then leap from rooftop to rooftop.
Despite a few less-chaotic sequences during its barely-more-than-32-minute runtime, the album doesn’t really give the listener a moment to breathe until an extended instrumental outro ending closer “Escape From Kirkland” brings the house’s heavy curtain crashing to the stage in excruciating slow-motion and if I’d not quite been able to keep up with everything coming at me in the preceding songs, this passage is less the respite I thought I deserved and more the fevered sonic meditation I didn’t know I needed. With guest saxophone from noted jazz experimentalist Skerik spiraling into the thunderclouds and spewing contrails of effects treatments while the world’s most unconventional cellist (and member of ’90s minimalist act Earth as well as early collaborator of Mirah), Lori Goldston, underpins the madness and adds an array of evisceral drone, this coda wordlessly confirms that Ewwwphoria has achieved everything it set out to, from grabbing us by the lapels and screaming into our faces that all is not well, not right, and not okay, to forcefully knocking our feet out from under us in order to bruise our asses badly enough that we won’t be able to keep sitting on them as events around us continue to unfold.