April 7th - 2026
Dopesick - Eyehategod
there's absolutely no reason for these guys to still be doing crack
Eyehategod is coming to Evansville on Friday night with fellow New Orleans natives Crowbar, which will end up being one of the biggest concerts (of any actually cool bands) to come through Evansville in the last five years - probably since Cro-Mags played at a (then new) local venue and, before playing a new song, Harley yelled ‘we’re not a fucking nostalgia band!’, while surrounded by musicians half his age, and killed the mood. One of my buddies' bands, (for posterity, named Ratking) is actually opening for them, which is huge (I just looked it up, Crowbar still has a million-and-a-half monthly listeners).
Even though Crowbar is the final act of the show, and likely the big draw for it, I’m more excited to see Eyehategod again. I mostly toil around Eyehategod’s earlier albums when I listen to their music. I tend to lean more punk if you had to plot my tastes along the punk/metal binary (a distinction I try not to make unless I’m being incredibly anal and pretentious about rock music subgenres), so it takes a very special kind of band to skew towards metal and catch my attention - the few exceptions being proto-metal bands like Sabbath or Deep Purple or Zepp.
1993’s ‘Take As Needed For Pain’ is not only Eyehategod’s best album (easily the band's most prolific), it may be one of the best out there. Easily a top ten metal-variant album. I’m a huge admirer of the art of naming conventions, so, without even regarding the music on the album, it’s a winner just by its tracklist - which was quite literally what drew my attention to the band and convinced me to listen for the first time, with classic song titles such as; ‘Kill your Boss’, ‘Crimes Against Skin’, ‘Sister Fucker (Pt. I and Pt. II)’, and ‘White Nigger’ (which has since been changed to ‘White Neighbor’ after some apprehension from the a cowardly drummer of Melvins fame).
It’s a great album. But I have this stupid kind of subconscious distrust in bands; wherein, if the first album I listen to from a band is around the middle of their body of work, and I end up really liking that album, I’ll just assume everything after that album is shit and everything before it is the real music or whatever. It’s not a horrible assumption to make; many bands get worse - but often, not as many as you would think. An example that flies in the face of this line of thinking, and one I have to constantly remind myself of, is the Ramones; a band who (despite making a lot of songs that I love) that has been so commercial for the last thirty years that they exist more (and by more I mean by scores) as a t-shirt logo than a band.
To the uninitiated, from the outside looking in, the Ramones would seem to be the quintessential nostalgia act, without more thought put into appearance than the craft, presenting more of a brand and less of a band (I think replacing band members and making the replacement musicians take the surname Ramone is pretty evident of this. The forever drummer for Blondie joined the Ramones and, instead of playing off of the success of Blondie they made him change his name to Ramone). Before I really listened to the Ramones, I was one of those kind of idiots that assumed that stupid ass shit, and because I was a stupid ass idiot, when I picked up the Ramones for the first time, my listenership was reserved to the early albums - I thought that anything they made in the 80’s would have to be awful, cloying, past it’s time (even though I was listening to fifty year old music), I essentially assumed they were like KISS, because that’s how all Gen X’ers talk about the Ramones (neither of which are bad bands). However, if I were to have stuck stubbornly by those assumptions, I would have never heard the Ramones best song - which, for how actually limited their chords are and how stripped down their message is a lot of the time, is one of the few outwardly political songs, and they aren’t even being slightly tongue-in-cheek, political in complete sincerity - ‘Bonzo Goes to Bitburg’. It’s not only one of their catchiest songs (literally infectious) but the message is so succinct, whereas so many protest songs let their point overbear the actual tune. And it’s not only from an eighties album, but from, like, their fourth eighties album.
A similar example; twenty years after the release of their first album in 1964, The Kinks made one of their best songs with ‘Living on A Thin Line’, and because I’m a stupid idiot who’s always trying to find some convenient pattern within everything, I would’ve never heard it if I never watched The Sopranos.
All of this to say; not all bands get worse after a similar time, or through whatever complex equation I used to determine what is a ‘later’ album versus an ‘early’ one, some bands just get better, and then never get bad. And not even just the ones that quit while they’re ahead. Gun Club was good until Jeff died. And if it weren’t through deliberate attempts to do whatever my preconceptions warn me against doing, I would have never listened to Eyehategod’s 1996 album ‘Dopesick’.
Friday I’ll be seeing Eyehategod again. I’ve already seen them once, but it was back before I listened to their music, and the only reason I went was a fifty year old dude me and my friends are kind of friends with (whose son is our age, and also our friend) loves Eyehategod, and I usually always enjoy live rock music as long as its heavy, and also they were performing at a bar. All I remember from that show now - which must have been from before I moved to Phoenix - was how funny the contrast was between the heroine-sludge-lazy-metal of the lineup and the downtown, seven-dollar-mixer, twenty-dollar-entrance-fee, actively gentrifying bar they were playing at, called ‘The Bokeh Lounge’ (actually in italics). If the dudes from Eyehategod didn’t have a merch table set up, the waitresses at Bokeh would profile them and neurotically check their wrists in passing for a stamp because none of them look like they have twenty dollars.
I’ll preface this by saying I have absolutely no idea how these guys live; they probably want to cultivate a homeless sort of aesthetic because it fits the sound of their music and probably also because they think it’s funny, but they could live in a suburb. I’ve done no research and I won’t. I just know that they look like shit, they smoke crack, and, for g ⃠ d knows how, they have a tenth of the listeners that Crowbar has on Spotify (which is basically the only metric I think I can trust when determining how well off a musician is).
When I was listening to Dopesick, I kept trying to figure out what band they sounded like, and then I realized that that album sounds like a ton of bands, but upon further analysis of my memory, none of them started before 1996, and in fact, many of them are at most ten-years old. Wherein they successfully took the elements of Black Flag grindcore, slowed it down to the point that it became metal (and sludge metal, specifically, maybe the earliest instance), broke down their vocals into grunted screams so that they were indecipherable, and still maintained the rhythm of a crossover act like Cro-Mags or DRI. This would end up becoming the recipe for quite literally hundreds of bands that together formed the predominate sound in hardcore music from circa 2007 to roughly 2020, culminating in Gulch as the perfect incarnation of sludgy-grindcore, after which time Sunami became the most popular hardcore band and ever since the predominant sound has been Limp Bizkit if they were much heavier and Fred Durst screamed his vocals (both of which rock).
But, even if Gulch is a defunct band, there are still dozens of big players in hardcore that owe the existence of their entire sound to Eyehategod’s ‘Dopesick’; Spy, GEL, Rabbit, SHIT, Volcano, Witness Chamber, DOM, MOT, Extinguish, En Love, Mexican Coke, Gay Kiss, Buggin, Pissmixer, GOON - to name a bunch. The closest band to an example of a similar approach to the punk/metal crossover dichotomy of heavy music that were around before 1996 is a little known New York punk band called Born Against, but even still, I think Eyehategod started right around the same time, and could very well have never even heard of Born Against.
They played such an important role in developing the sound of crossover that skewed metal that, to my thinking, they should be as iconic and have as many flowers as Black Flag gets. To make that final breakthrough from still just barely being able to understand what the vocalist was saying in bands like Bad Brains or Minor Threat, to just not even attempting to sound the lyrics and instead belching them like a pissed off drunk is a stroke of genius, akin to TVU discovering discordant chord progression or Neil Young using his voice as an instrument to compensate for the fact that his voice isn’t classically beautiful. And I just hope they only do crack as a joke, and if not, I hope Big Rock n Roll intervenes for the sake of their historical significance to the craft.
Not only are they the forefathers of some of mine and your favorite bands; they are responsible for one of the funniest interactions I’ve ever been a witness to.
The only other memory I have of the last Eyehategod show I saw involves Zube (our fifty year old friend) talking me into accompanying him to the Eyehategod merch table to bother their roadie for ten minutes (immediately after their set ended) about him getting a setlist, and the roadie (who looked more well kempt then all of the god guys, which was kinda bogus, god’s roadie should be a terminal heroine addict to my thinking) was so directly opposed to getting Zube a setlist, and Zube wasn’t registering any of this guy’s animosity and any time the roadie would say like “No, dude, fuck off, fuck you, bald old man,” (getting so frustrated that he rose above his station) Zube would just respond with something like “Ah, I just love those guys, man, they rock, they’re my favorite band, man, you sure you ain’t got a setlist?” Much like a toddler. I genuinely think Zube’s obliviousness versus the roadie’s growing anger got to a point where the roadie threatened to beat his ass and I had to snap Zube back to reality and lead him away. It’s still funny thinking about it now, just how retarded Zube is, and how retarded god is and how prolific their music is because of it.