On their latest EP, the band crumples up angst and complacency and offers a simple, singular diagnosis: you may feel numb, but fight.
Last year, as the pandemic flared in New York and pundits declared the end of the city, as wealthy residents fled in droves, Show Me the Body’s Corpus collective of artists and musicians started offering self-defense classes on Zoom. “TRAIN TODAY,” one caption beckoned urgently. They may end up the last band in New York, but they’ll go out swinging, and on their latest EP Survive, they invite listeners to do the same.
While concepts like burnout and fatigue have become ubiquitous, vocalist Julian Cashwan-Pratt can’t relate. Flipping through TV channels, he sees gory beheadings on network dramas smeared together with footage of grand-standing presidents all as one big pageant of ginned-up emotion. He can only stand a few seconds before putting his foot through the screen. Or, as he sings on “Rubberband,” over the teeth-grinding pulse of synthesizers that sound like they were peeled off the bottom of a sneaker: “It’s no longer enough to survive.”
Show Me the Body crumple up angst and its accompanying complacency and give a simple, singular diagnosis: you may feel numb, but train. As ever, every “you” in their lyrics is a coward, a scumbag, or a target of Cashwan-Pratt’s accusations. His voice is acrobatic across the EP, every spit, shriek, bellow, and burble used to mock, shake, and pull the listener out of their reverie into the living, bleeding world he inhabits.
On all three tracks, he rhymes “cry” with “die,” welding the concepts together as the EP progresses. “People on TV” starts, as the band’s songs often do, with an innocuous enough observation: “People on TV sure know how to die/Everyone at home knows how to cry,” he sings. Banjo and bass screech and creak ominously; and by the next lyric, the rage starts seeping through: “People who talk sure know how to lie.”
The EP’s title track is the culmination of this juxtaposition between death and tears. Cashwan-Pratt deadpans: “I never cry watching pigs die.” But as the sludgy bassline and shredded banjo pick up, he admits: “Cry for my people, man, I cry all the time.” He’s unable to participate in the trance of angst, the gray washout in which tragedy is directionless and accountability is just another casualty.
The music video for “Survive” is like a montage from a boxing movie or a shounen anime. Subjects do push-ups and sit-ups in kitchens that barely fit their bodies. Cashwan-Pratt, who directed the video, never instructs the actors to reflect the fury of the music on their faces; they stare, expressionless and glassy-eyed, past the viewer. The band is unendingly suspicious of farce—before mourning lost loved ones on “Rubberband,” Cashwan-Pratt stops himself, scoffing that “the words just cheapen the cost.” Instead, Show Me the Body recommits to the real and tangible: the heat of blood, of tears and concrete, and a reality worth fighting for.
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