Zeke

The LA Weekly says “ZEKE sound like the DWARVES if they snorted a tub of meth every day,” Village Voice describes the Seattle band as “chainsaw punk rock,” and some enthusiastic writer from Guitar World believes "[he] can say without hyperbole that this big-guitar engine-block rock is a million times better than whatever it is you're currently listening to”—which if you do the math, means you are listening to an actual chainsaw hacking the heads off babies.

I heard a lot of noise. My seven-year-old daughter was sitting cross-legged next to me as I played “Lords of the Highway,” her knee and head moving in time to the beat—reflexively, though; she hadn’t meant to.

“You like this music,” I said when I noticed it.

“No, I don’t!” she countered.

She liked it; she just knew not to get caught liking it. Zeke is the kind of primal that seven-year-olds are supposed to be moving away from, like polite pet owners turning away from cats in heat.

The hardest, “Kill Myself 2 day,” whose chorus seems to be “Die!” screams at you—vocally, the delivery is metal, but the guitars, bass lines, and drums are richly rock, slasher rock, evocative of eighties metal howls and screeching bass solos. I can see the album being the inspiration behind a Dead Weather song like “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” in which Jack White and Alison Mosshart shoot at each other as they swagger through a suburban desert in leather jackets. “God of GSXR,” a 36-second headbanger perfect for hardcore kissing against a gas station wall, would make a good trailer to an epic all-American film about not giving a fuck.

I’d fuck to it.

Thing is you’d have to fuck to “Lord of the Highway” because the songs are on the short side, even for quickies. You could fuck to “Lord of the Highway,” say, the two-minute forty-two seconds song that’s twice as long as the next longest whose video depicts a Dukes of Hazard style car chase—exactly the kind of car Zeke would sound hot in the backseat of. Still, I’d want to be done, outside smoking already, by the time a song like “Mainline” played:

Running up the mainline/the fucking mainline Running up the mainline/all right Running up the mainline/the fucking mainline Running up the mainline/all right/[yelling]

It’s catchy, but catchy’s not what you want post-back-seat-of-the-car sex. Somehow that one’s just too cheap.

The sound is awesome. Now if only the band had more to say.