Dylan McCartney
Watching Weakness perform is like
watching James Brown perform, if James Brown’s backing band played screechy,
feedback-laden punk, and James Brown was a skinny white kid with swoopy hair. Their
front man Kevin Doyle pogoes around the stage like he’s on a trampoline, he crawls
on the ground, throws his guitar, all while belting out lyrics until his voice
goes hoarse.
They’ve been a band for a few
years, with a swinging door of musicians joining and leaving the band (Kevin
and Michael Squeri are only two founding members remaining), they’ve played
some noteworthy shows around the Midwest (including shows with The
Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and they’ve been featured on Noisey
Vice by The Black Lips.
Their live presence has always been
their focal point, it seems. “Weakness melds cluster-bomb aural assault and
ragdoll mania, so seamlessly you forget how tough it is to rock too hard while
playing as far out as these four dudes,” says Charles D’Ardenne, who fronts the
Cincinnati group Comprador and
admires Weakness’s energy. “No other band in Cincinnati sounds this weird and
dangerous. It’s enough to make you want to crawl in to the kick drum if primary
vocalist/gymnast Kevin Doyle weren’t already messing around in there. Weakness
hemorrhages punk.”
The three-piece Cincinnati based
group—currently made up of members Kevin Doyle, Michael Squeri and Michael
Sawan—started a few years ago as the brainchild of Doyle, who had been writing
songs during his high school years.
“I met Michael Squeri (the drummer)
at a bar where all the high school punk bands played in Cheviot (a small town
outside of Cincinnati),” he says. “We were in equally shitty bands then, and he
approached me interested in playing drums, and that’s how we started.”
They named the project “Weakness,”
which Doyle says was the result of him trying to come up with a name that
“didn’t sound tough.” The irony isn’t lost—like Joy Division, or Tiny Tim, the
name is an antithesis of their reality. The guys in Weakness aren’t tough guys.
In fact, Doyle is humble, cordial and overwhelmingly friendly— the kind of guy
who would thank every single member of the crowd for coming to a show if he
could. But their music sure isn’t as friendly. It’s a sort of crux between
catchy punk, something you’d hear from a band like Tyvek, and an acute sonic
barrage of shrill noise. But they're not quite that simple. They also slip some impressive dynamic songwriting in the mix, incorporating some weirdo quiet jams into their set. They’re the kind of band that acquires new true
believers with every freakishly impressive performance.
On stage, Doyle is a blur of
motion beside Michael Sawan, who alternates between groovy bass lines and piquant keyboard licks. Doyle jumps off of Squeri’s drum set, crawls on the ground (occasionally
poking his head into Michael’s kick drum while doing so), climbs on rafters
or whatever else he can grab on to that hangs from the ceiling, and hammers away at his beat up Fender Mustang.
He says he doesn’t practice the
moves—they come naturally.
“Sometimes I get a little carried
away,” Doyle says. “I’ve messed up quite
a bit of Michael’s drum kit. That’s why at this point I just tell him to use my
drum gear.”
In addition to the appeal of their
live show, there’s another aspect of the band that has sort of added to the
mystique. They still haven’t released an
album.
Not that they haven’t released
several demo style recordings. One worth noting is “The Tape,” a bombastically lo-fi collection
of incredible songs with a picture of Doyle as a young boy with his hands
pressed together like an altar boy and a toothy smile. It’s loud enough to
cause your tape player to clip.
The plan, according to Kevin, has
been to rerecord several of the songs from that release as well as other songs
they’ve had—and it seems like it’s finally going to happen. “We’re just about done
recording all of this stuff,” Doyle says. “It’s been a long process, more-so
because of things we can’t control, like our old guitarist moving away and
stuff.”
“I don’t even want it printed how
long this album has taken,” Kevin says, laughing. “This whole process has just
been constipated, and I really hope it doesn’t flop.”
His humble nature (when we chatted,
he consistently peppered in questions to me about my band, so as to assure that all the attention wasn’t on him) is
refreshing, and interesting coupled with his on-stage persona as an
unpredictable, Iggy Pop-style front man.
Weakness doesn’t want to be Black
Flag. You won’t see them on stage with their eyebrows furled; trying to scare
the audience into thinking they’re tough. They’re just some twenty-something’s
who really, really like to make
noise.
See also: Squeri’s other excellent
band Gazer
Yep, you nailed it.
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