Just A Feeling In The Room

Miya Folick “Pet Body”

Miya Folick sings with a passion and flair that sometimes reminds me specifically of Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker. Not so much the aspects of Corin’s voice that could blow a hole through a mountain with their volume and intensity, but certainly the times when her phrasing becomes more playful and deliberately camp. Folick leans into this approach when she’s conveying sarcasm and irony, which is to say, a lot of “Pet Body.” She’s singing about feeling alienated from her own body in humorous terms – “I’m just a brain with a pet body,” “I’m just a sack of flesh, don’t take me so seriously” – but it’s a dark joke at her own expense. This is extreme self-deprecation to the point of self-negation, and her emphasis on the fragility of this body that’s just incidentally tethered to her mind makes every part of her life seem arbitrary and precarious. Folick nails a very tricky balance of comedy and terror here, in large part because she commits so fully to her performance.

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