LIVE JOURNAL: FREAKOUT FEST 2021 (Friday)
Name: Freakout Fest!
Description: A small little festival hosted by Freakout Records’ Guy Keltner stretched between a handful of venues in Seattle’s increasingly-bougie Ballard neighborhood.
I’ve been anticipating this event for months, though the excitement was initially more nervousness because I rarely go to festivals and, on even rarer occasions, cover them as independent press. This would be my first time, in fact. I wanted to do it right, so I pulled out the old Canon, the one I inadvertently “borrowed” from an HR manager years ago (if you’re reading this I’m so sorry, your donation will not go to waste), grabbed the nearest convenient lens I could find, and traipsed on down to the F.O.E. to see some bands…
…on Friday, at least. I made the tough decision to decided to skip the first day of Freakout for a number of factors; sleep deprivation, forgotten equipment, looming deadlines, the fact that I was close to shitting myself all day, etc. You tend to put your body through a lot when you have no money and a lot of work to do, so I chose the self-care route; I guess I’m finally getting too old not to be ruthless about my own well-being. I apologize to all the bands I missed on Thursday and wanted to see – Bird Language, The Darts, Bodies on the Beach, Cerrero, Carrion Kids, all of them. I’m assuming y’all killed it.
Here are some brief words on the bands I saw Friday night. Read on!
All thoughts are mine; all experiences are mine. If you don’t like it, you can go [eat a grilled mackerel and then have grilled mackerel burps for the rest of the night.]
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SEBASTIAN ADÉ
After pulling out the battered vaxx-card and procuring an ID wristband, I headed into the top floor of Salmon Bay for the first act of the night. Sebastian Adé hailed all the way from Brooklyn, and on stage he claimed this was the first time he’d ever played the West Coast. An honor, as it turned out, because the man has an incredible voice.
With just hushed electric guitar as accompaniment, Adé riffed through slow, sultry R&B numbers of his own design. He focused on life in love: romance, heartbreak, missed connections, chance encounters, gratitude. My personal highlight of the set was an Usher cover Adé performed with drop-dead accuracy, pantomiming the lyrics like a storyteller. I’m trying to remember the last time I had attended such a set – Young-Chhaylee Khat at the Sunset comes immediately to mind – simply because I don’t often find myself in front of performers willing to put themselves, and their vices, out there with such minimal accompaniment. This one was a true talent, and a super strong start to the night.
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URBAN HEAT
Descending a floor into the night air, I caught a crowd hypnotized by a three-piece from Austin. Even in media res, you could tell this band were heavily inspired by steely, 80s-era industrial synth-pop a la Depeche Mode. I counted two instruments (besides the mic) on stage: a Squire Jaguar bass and an electronic board with bunch of knobs and switches I couldn’t make out. The two players behind them pulsed out a low-end clatter while frontman Jonathon Horstmann paced across the floor. The man had energy. I could barely get a focused shot, he was moving around so much (that’s a lie, I’m honestly just a crap photographer who cherishes excuses).
I’ll be honest, this kind of music has never really been my cup of tea, but Urban Heat won me over. Horstmann kind of has the perfect voice for this style. It’s bassy, rounded, even, forceful, purposeful. It makes you want to believe he means exactly what he says in his songs. (I was especially taken by an anthemic track named “That Gun In Your Hand,” which I took to be a pro gun-control song – something that’s likely pretty common in Austin’s underground scene, I can’t say for sure.) As the set progressed the heat built, and Horstmann, already dripping sweat, fired up to an even greater fervor. Consummate performers, the lot of them. I’ll have to remind myself to catch their debut album when it comes out next year.
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SHAINA SHEPHERD
Every music festival spread out across distances requires you make hard decisions about which musical acts you want to see in such a limited amount of time. Unless you’re a teleporting wizard or one of the Sense8 (like in the show Sense8) you’ll never catch everybody. For transparency’s sake, I committed myself, and am committing myself, to catching acts outside of Seattle except for the local acts I hadn’t seen before. This was one of them.
I’ve been following Shaina Shepherd for a few years now. My first exposure to her was at the ‘Zoid in 2019, watching her tear down the Monkey Pub as the lead singer of BEARAXE. I remember it because that was the precise moment in the night that my voice went hoarse from hollering. Since then, I’ve never had the chance to catch her solo show, though she did that rendition of her song “The Virus” for BAZZOOKA and it knocked the wind out of me. She’s just so good. She’s a wonderful singer that also never gets caught up in the bureaucratic brambles of “good singing”. She shouts, she contorts her face, she wails and screams and pushes you to wail and scream along with her. Because of this, Shepherd is a larger-than-life character and an obvious candidate for a hyped solo career.
I guess other people had the same idea, because Shepherd’s set was the first time I noticed how many cameras were present. I mean I was one of them, but it felt like the entire front row were just cameras, people whose job (or passion) was to make sure they caught the firebrand on stage. Maybe its because I’m new to the whole “I’m-official-press-so-give-me-special-treatment” thing, but I couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed. Do camera wielders actually listen to the sets they cover? I’d hope so, because I found myself wanting someone like Shepherd to deliver her energy to people who could send it back, not just to culture vultures (like me) with an agenda.
Regardless, if there was anyone who demanded snapshots for posterity, it was Shepherd. With her hair done up huge and in a beautiful sequined dress, she commanded a presence from the moment she strolled to the stage. She and her band nailed it, laying down familiar cuts and introducing new songs that already felt like small classics. Shepherd’s solo music is weird, but the best kind of weird: compelling for its idiosyncratic harmonic and rhythmic choices, and unique to the person creating it. Once I was done with photos, I felt I need to put the camera away and just lean in to the music, letting the rapid changes in dynamics and Shepherd’s spontaneous vocal eruptions send me to new places. I couldn’t stay for the whole set, but I know the band is up for a set at my workplace in the next few weeks, so I’ll have to commit to watch her tear down the studio there.
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JAIME WYATT
It was now 10:00 PM, a few hours since I arrived in Ballard, and I had visited one venue in total. The night air delivered a summons and I happily obliged. My next destination was the Tractor Tavern, an old favorite that – according to my new camera-wielding acquaintance – had absolutely terrible lighting for photography. You know, he wasn’t wrong. (I appreciate him asking me if I was good at shooting, me replying in the negative, and then him swinging his ridiculously-expensive rig around my neck as if the answer didn’t matter. It made me feel like I had made it, in some small way.)
I, like a lot of gay millennial men, have a complicated relationship with country. I’m just not really a masochist, you know what I mean? It’s why I quit being a Catholic. I acknowledge now that the old punchline is not only cliche but classist; really, every genre has its sour examples, but country’s just happened to be front and center during my formative years. What I’ve learned since starting this blog is that there’s a crap-ton of good country music if you know where to find it. And Jamie Wyatt? Girl, she’s good country.
Wyatt currently resides in Nashville, but having grown up in Tacoma, she has Washington roots. In some spheres of music it helps to have a backstory, and Jaime’s got one. Signed at seventeen years old (almost twenty years ago) she found mild success stymied by the fraught mechanics of the music industry, and she fell into hard drugs. On stage she introduced a song with a small aside about going to jail, and that was for robbing her heroin dealer. Today, she’s healthy and ready for a fresh start. She’s also queer, and that’s exactly the kind of energy the genre needs.
I heard “Neon Cross” on a playlist Guy sent over in preparation for the fest, and my ears instantly perked up. That is a damn good song, driven by a galloping snare pattern and a warm guitar line on the chorus, and her lonely malaise is something I could personally relate to. She burned through that, along with a bunch of other cuts off of her new album of the same name, and the crowd responded in kind. Some couples even went the extra mile and threatened a full-hoedown situation. True to a title like “Rattlesnake Girl,” she sunk her fangs into my brain; as of this morning, I can’t shake the venom.
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CEDRIC BURNSIDE
Something told me I shouldn’t leave my spot at the front of the stage, and my gut (which was still struggling to process all that fish and rice from hours earlier) was right. By the time Hill country blues royalty Cedric Burnside took to the stage, the Tractor had become stuffed with people, so much so that I probably couldn’t have left even if I wanted to. The man demanded an audience, and he deserved one.
Like country, blues is a genre I’ve never been overly familiar with. I think it’s because I’m an “album listener,” one of those pitifully pretentious souls who prefers music in the comfort of their own headspace. Blues is not “headspace” music. It’s meant to be experienced live, letting the artist feed you with the simple, raw power of minimal ingredients. In that context it has the power to exorcise your demons, to dig out your soul and scrape off the gunk. Case in point: I remember listening to a track like “We Made It” and not really getting the hype, but in practice, with the oomph of live drums and Burnside’s towering figure infusing sweat into the mix like an IV drip, it shook the house down. Good god.
It’s funny, when I think of “technical skill” where it relates to instrument prowess, my mind goes to the guitar heroes I grew up watching back in high school, the Guthrie Govans and Steve Vais of the world who could probably start a mean fire with just their fingers. Burnside didn’t solo the way someone like Wyatt’s lead guitarist did, but you could still easily sense his mastery of the instrument. He played with sharp rhythm and a melodic capaciousness, working rhythm and lead simultaneously while filling as many notes as needed into the air. Above all, you can see the passion in his face. That man is happy to be on stage playing blues. I walked away feeling like something in me had been released, energized.
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THE BLACK TONES
This was the other local act I felt it necessary to catch, because friends of mine have been raving about their set since Cobain and Cornbread dropped two years ago. The Black Tones, at this point, are local legends, known for putting on bombastic shows powered by a sense of community and an inability to take themselves seriously. Eva Walker, meanwhile, is about as close to an ideal emissary of the Seattle underground as anybody. Besides her role as the band’s front woman, she routinely hosts Audioasis every Friday night on KEXP, during which she promotes as much stellar local music as she can get her hands on. She’s starred in films, she’s guested in other bands and on other albums, and there doesn’t seem to be a moment when she isn’t working her hardest or standing her proudest. Walker is an icon, in every sense of the word.
Remember like a minute ago when I wrote that blues is not “headspace” music? I originally wrote a review of Cobain and Cornbread for this site that was positive but a little dampened. Maybe I was thrown off by comparative enthusiasm, but to me, something felt a little lost in translation on recording. Maybe it was Jack Endino’s production – I consistently find it’s a little bit of a trap to go with recognizable older names over younger, fresher ears – or, to be fair, it might not be possible to convey what happens on stage in a digital recording environment.
Because, and here’s my strongest use of italics at least on this page, you have to see this band live. They’re simply amazing. Eva (and twin brother Cedric, on drums) play the crowd like a fiddle, encouraging sing-alongs and indulging in silent fermatas while laying down simple, effective blues rock. By the end of the night, rapper Jango, who’s playing tomorrow at Conor Byrne, took the stage to freestyle as the crowd sang along; Eva, whose rig had crapped out for some unknown unfortunate reason, took the opportunity to crowd surf and swing the axe around in a feat of blissed showmanship. If I had chosen to leave Ballard then (which, considering the state of my bank account, I should have) it would have been a dynamite capper on a series of excellent sets.
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NO JOY
Except, of course, I had to catch No Joy before the night was over. It’s been a while since I listened to Motherhood, a record I gave a glowing review of last year for its fantastic exploration of shoegaze in genreless terms. I needed to remind myself of White-Gluz’s dominance.
Walking into Conor Byrne, I was suddenly aware of how late it had become, because the venue had maybe twenty people left in it. By the time No Joy took the stage, I was one of maybe ten or fifteen audience members. That’s a real shame, because of all the bands I had the privilege of seeing that night, this one personally blew my hair back. They just sounded so heavy and so tight at the same time, creating such a massive sound between just three people.
In fact, the way White-Gluz had set up their effects boards, I legitimately had no idea where all that sound was coming from, What were the band playing, and what was being played on top? I found it especially impressive how, considering the layers of backing tracks underneath, drummer Garland Hastings was able to keep perfect time. It’s a setup that could easily go awry without practice, and the fact that everything went off without a hitch made the set even more impressive.
The other thing that stuck with me was the image of White-Gluz’s accompanying guitarist Tara McLeod headbanging, her hair cyclonically whipping around. I wasn’t around during the old Seattle scene, and I have no desire for that scene to be resuscitated in modern fashion, but I’ve read enough on it to wonder what exactly the vibe might have felt like. Both McLeod’s and White-Gluz’s stage presence helped me tune into that alternate reality. Their shambolic movements, combined with the heaviness of the sound on stage, felt like a bit of familiar magic pulled from a different era. I was enthralled throughout, and even though the set deserved more people, somehow it made it feel even more special, like I was on a private tour to a natural wonder. Selfish, I know, but you gotta grab those moments when you can.
Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people