Box of Dark Roses presents the final 27 songs written, arranged and recorded by trans activist and musician stevie (Pohlman), a massive two-LP set that showcases her DIY art, passionate engagement and close links to other trans advocates, poets and revolutionaries.
Mope Grooves emerged in Portland, Oregon in the late teens, with a brash but vulnerable guitar rock sound and a message, from the beginning, about gender identity, inclusion and mental health. Their early albums, Joy and Vanished from 2017 and 2018 respectively, bristled with punk energy, with shouted anthems and loose-slung, infectious melodies. Dusted’s Jason Gioncontere called Desire, the band’s fourth album, “their most cohesive set yet,” late in 2019. And Portland’s Ben Parrish who caught them early and fell hard, wrote of an early show, “And Mope Grooves—Pohlman’s band—broke my brain. Imagine if somebody ran records by The Raincoats, The Clean, Beat Happening, Tyvek, and Marine Girls through a wood chipper and glued the pieces into a new super-record.”
Musically, Box of Dark Roses is more keyboard- and synthesizer-based than Mope Grooves’ earlier album, an uneasy sweetness percolating in its gentle melodies. The soft pretty songs are, in some ways, the most disturbing. “Forever Is a Long Time” pits tootling organ riffs against a sing-song melody, but sharpens the edge with rattling, off-kilter drumming. “Aileen” floats hauntingly graceful vocals over space-video-game pinging and rushing drums. “They’ll tell you you’re a criminal for paying them back in kind, but in the dark, in the wild, in the heart of the night, it is right to fight,” sings band member Lee. It’s a bracing sentiment in a song dedicated to Aileen Wuornos, a sex worker from Florida who killed seven of her clients, purportedly in self-defense. And “I’m Tired All the Time,” with its music box chimes, spiraling fiddle and slapping, just-behind-the-beat percussion, is a lullaby or a suicide note, depending on how you hear it.
Politics turn more explicit in the tracks with extensive spoken word incorporated. Marilyn Buck, the poet and May 19 Communist organization revolutionary best known for freeing Assata Shakur from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey, speaks on a handful of cuts, including the opener “Controlled Burn” and “Here Comes the Moon.” The song “Continuity and Intensity,” tells the story of the Black Liberation Army’s Kuwasi Balagoon, who, when put on trial, declared, “We have a right to resist, to expropriate money and arms, to kill the enemy of our people, to bomb, and do whatever else aids us in winning, and we will win. The foundation of the revolution must rest on the bones of the oppressors.” The song “Dora” recites a detailed account of gender oppression in Weimar, Germany and the suppression of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research. The ratio of polemic to hook is pretty high on these tracks, but these were issues that mattered to stevie, and, as such, they belong here.
Box of Dark Roses was made near the end of stevie’s life (she killed herself in 2024), after a long struggle against gender dysphoria, physical and mental health issues, poverty and sporadic homelessness. In a lengthy, revealing essay included as liner notes, she writes, “I funded the recording process and the deposit on my surgeries by submitting my body to hyper-exploitation. I worked vanilla jobs 40-70 hours a week most of the time before relying increasingly on the informal economy. I was frequently in severe pain and losing work from chronic disabling illnesses that are aggravated by intense labor.”
And yet, though her suffering was real, she never lost sight of how much worse off others could be, particularly black and brown trans people. Before her death she stipulated that all profits from Box of Dark Roses should go to “gender marginalized survivors incarcerated as punishment for defending themselves, either directly to their fundraisers/commissary funds or thru the Survived and Punished NY mutual aid fund.” This is a difficult, important record, a whole different experience from Mope Grooves’ earlier lo-fi garage albums, but well worth making time for.
izzy806
stormborns
pixelskylines
gummygunk
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
jbbartram-illu
