Cascadia Calling 2026.4.14
"they never show the monster until the third act"
[Programming Note: From here on, Cascadia Calling will be releasing on Tuesdays, rather than Mondays. This is for personal reasons that are obscure, largely even to me. Thank you for your cooperation.]
One thing I’ve had to face getting back into lifting in my 40s is that old age has come for my body, its ravages just aren’t evenly distributed. In my case, I feel like my shoulders are two decades more frail than the rest of me. I’d been ignoring a little bit of growing shoulder pain for a few weeks until it insisted upon itself and made many lifting completely untenable.
These days I do most of my listening to music when I’m walking or at the gym. Given that lifting is off the table, I’ve been taking more long, maudlin, meandering walks. Earlier this week, I took my lunch break to walk down to the waterfront and I put on an artist that I’d stumbled across but hadn’t gotten a chance to dig into yet, a noise rock group out of Chicago called Weaklung.
It was an unintentionally great choice. Not only is the band great, but it’s hard for me to feel self-pity when I’m listening to noise rock. The palette of emotions that gritty, loud rock music provides me makes it hard to mix up sorrow or gloom.
The first thing that gripped me about Weaklung was the vocals. (One note, I can’t really find much info about the members of the band, so I won’t be mentioning their names individually, since I can’t attribute them to what they play.)
When I first heard “Friends in the Industry” I spent a good half hour with it on loop, wracking my brain to figure out who the vocalist sounded like. They reminded me of some particular classic post-punk vocalist that I just couldn’t place. I decided, without much satisfaction, that it was a false relation. That it was the combination of David Byrne cadence with a heavier, a more urgent Mark E. Smith timbre that had tricked me. Like both of those vocalists, though, it’s immediately recognizable as something different and more evocative than the typical rock vocalist.
The composition is also a little different from a typical noise rock group. The drums do a lot of textural work, allowing the guitar to be thinner and more understated. The jumpy, melodic basslines are easy to miss at first (I actually wish they were much more prominent) but also provide a level of compositional subtlety that’s rare for the genre.
The result is a song that plays a delightful trick on the listener. The roles of the instruments are shuffled around from where you expect to find them, leading to a little auditory scavenger hunt and heightening the pleasant disorientation that noise rock provides.
Discovering a great local artist from a city that’s not mine also had me thinking about the death of the local scene. Mark Fisher pointed out that the Internet means that local genres and geographically-isolated scenes can’t really develop anymore. Everyone can hear and be influenced by everyone else, so the evolutionary Petri dishes that were local scenes get too easily polluted.
So while I can’t say that Weaklung is typical of any kind of Chicago scene, they’re the kind of rough-but-serious rock band that flourished in dark local rock clubs all over the country twenty years ago. They have flare but no polish, which is a combination that I’m congenitally built to find extremely cool.
Of course there is a plus side to the death of scenes, which is that the Internet also helps me stumble on “local” bands from two thousand miles away. And I get to hear them even if they never get worn down in a professional studio or have the kind of gloss that typically gets applied when bands leave their own area code and have to compete for attention on a national scale.