There are two very different approaches to making loud, aggressive music. One involves playing as fast as humanly possible, presumably with the assistance of some highly questionable stimulants. The other involves playing so slowly that the music itself appears to be experiencing the effects of a powerful sedative.
On Oct. 15, the Black Cat hosted a master class in both when Weedeater headlined with support from Zeke.
Zeke
Seattle’s Zeke have been terrorizing eardrums since 1992, earning their stripes as staples of Epitaph Records’ Punk-O-Rama compilations and releasing records like Kicked in the Teeth (1998) and Dirty Sanchez (2000). Their particular brand of hardcore-meets-rockabilly-meets-rock-and-roll sounds like Motörhead and the MC5 got into a fistfight at a truck stop, and everyone involved decided to form a band afterward.
The four-piece, featuring original members Blind Marky Felchtone on guitar/vocals and Donny Paycheck on drums, wasted precisely zero seconds establishing the evening’s tempo. Launching into “Highway Star,” Zeke proceeded to deliver roughly 40 minutes of uninterrupted, 200-plus-BPM auditory violence.
No banter. No breaks. No mercy.
Watch Zeke perform “Highway Star” live in 1995 on YouTube:
I have no idea what kind of heart attack warnings these guys are getting on their fitness watches, but I’m reasonably certain each member lost ten pounds during the set.
Felchtone, in particular, was a revelation. His guitar solos were absolutely fucking nuts: blistering, chaotic bursts of fretboard insanity that owed as much to Wayne Kramer’s Detroit proto-punk as they did to the frantic precision of Bad Brains. Somehow, buried beneath all that speed and distortion, there was actual rock-and-roll craftsmanship.
The band’s catalog includes six full-length studio albums, most recently 2018’s Hellbender, and judging by the sheer velocity of the performance, they may have managed to play material from all of them. I lost count somewhere around like song number 30. It’s entirely possible they were still playing the first one.
The crowd responded enthusiastically, although the circle pit remained surprisingly modest. Your humble correspondent took up residence near the stage, where Zeke’s bassist generously spat on me several times. I initially hoped it was beer. Upon further consideration, I suspect it was concentrated beard sweat, administered via aerosol.
I also ran into fellow Parklife contributor Virgil, who offered perhaps the most succinct review of the evening: “I didn’t know what a Zeke was before the show. Ten out of ten. No notes.”
Hard to argue with that.
Weedeater
If Zeke’s performance required amphetamines to fully appreciate, headliners Weedeater offered something closer to a guided tour of the human endocannabinoid system.
The Wilmington, North Carolina, trio have been peddling their particular strain of sludge and doom metal since 1998, led by bassist/vocalist Dave “Dixie” Collins and guitarist Dave “Shep” Shepherd. Across albums like …And Justice for Y’all (2001), God Luck and Good Speed (2007), and Goliathan (2015), they’ve perfected the art of making music that sounds like a malfunctioning industrial machine being dragged through a swamp.
Before the band played a note, the house speakers treated us to “Thank You for Being a Friend,” the theme song from The Golden Girls. This was accompanied by some leisurely sound checking and Collins enthusiastically chugging from a BYOB bottle of bourbon. Naturally.
Meanwhile, Virgil had apparently made a new friend in the crowd, whose generosity included an unexpected and rather substantial toke session.
“They’re called what? Weedeater, right?” he asked, staring thoughtfully into the middle distance. “Yeah, I’ll probably like them then.”
The man’s powers of deduction remained formidable.
Stream “Monkey Junction” by Weedeater on YouTube:
Once Weedeater got underway, the evening’s musical pendulum swung violently in the opposite direction. Gone were Zeke’s frantic tempos and machine-gun guitar solos. In their place came enormous, lumbering riffs, punishing low-end frequencies, and songs that oozed into one another like molten asphalt.
And somehow, the circle pit got bigger.
There’s something wonderfully counterintuitive about watching a room full of people enthusiastically beat the shit out of one another to music moving at approximately the speed of continental drift. But the Black Cat faithful understood the assignment.
The sound was overwhelmingly bottom-heavy, with Collins’ distorted bass dominating the proceedings. Every amplifier sounded broken, which I mean as the highest possible compliment. Beneath the sludge, you could still hear traces of the Kinks’ gloriously filthy guitar tones, stretched, detuned, and dragged through several decades of increasingly questionable life decisions.
Collins himself was a fascinating spectacle, alternating between guttural vocal assaults, swigs of bourbon, and expressions that made me wonder what exactly was happening behind those eyes. Seriously, were those contacts? Was he looking at us? Through us? Into another dimension?
The band also enthusiastically smoked weed and cigarettes onstage, apparently treating the Black Cat’s strict smoking policies as more of a philosophical suggestion than an enforceable rule.
By this point, Virgil had happily rejoined the communion of rock and roll, and the increasingly unhinged congregation was having a magnificent time.
Where Zeke’s set was a relentless sprint toward cardiac arrest, Weedeater’s was a slow, deliberate descent into the primordial ooze. Both bands delivered exactly what they promised, albeit through radically different chemical pathways.
The whole evening was loud, loose, sloppy, sweaty, and gloriously fleshy.
I left smelling like a dispensary that had caught fire inside a motorcycle repair shop.
Ten out of ten. No notes.
