He once complained that the scene sleeps on him so here's a deep dive
2008 was memorable year for local music. At the time the historic Woolworth space in downtown Oxnard housed the Experimental Café, and it was the place to see live music in Ventura County. There was Delaney Gibson and her classically-trained brilliance. There was the Volume Knockers and their charmingly goofy, School of Rock-esque traditionalism. There was the Ashtray Life and his busker chic. And so many more, including End Transmission.
Consisting of Hunter Cook on drums, Jordan Brunner on the guitar and Zeke Berkley on the keyboard and lead vocals, End Transmission was a power pop band with shades of Weezer, Blink-182 and local brethren Army of Freshmen. The closest comparison is probably Ozma, an underrated band that Zeke has cited as a huge influence.
Start Transmission
I saw End Transmission play many times at the Experimental Café and it was always a blast. Songs like "Fences Make Good Neighbors" and "Make Like a Tree and Get Outta Here" were catchy as hell, and Zeke and Jordan would often banter between songs, playfully antagonizing each other & quipping back and forth in a way that was often as entertaining as the tunes themselves.
In 2009 End Transmission released Devour, their debut full-length album. It's so good that it instantly dated the band's previous tracks. Granted, the Head Over Heels EP did a poor job of recreating their contagiously joyful live energy (the slog they turned "Fences Make Good Neighbors" into is particularly frustrating). Still, Devour finds End Transmission leveling up by leaps and bounds.
Album opener "Talking in Circles" goes through two distinct sections before vocals kick in. Mutations like this find their way onto many tracks on Devour; it's a welcome tendency as the band excels at extended instrumental passages. "Wow, Really?" displays a newfound grittiness, and it's a sound that suits them extremely well. “Outer Space, Inner Sinner” unfurls with patience and confidence but still manages to rock. "Right Side of the Bed" is Axis of Awesome fodder but there's a reason why that formula endures.
Devour is one of my favorite albums of all time, locally-based or otherwise. It's fantastic.
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In 2013, End Transmission drummer Hunter Cook passed away. Jordan and Zeke decided to discontinue the band, and End Transmission was no more. Zeke would eventually rebrand as a solo artist, pivoting from rock to something more akin to bedroom pop.
Berkley I arrived in 2013 and its follow-up, Berkley II, was released in 2016. "Garbage/Ears" is a fucking journey. The song evokes marching band drum lines, the Fright Night soundtrack, Lana Del Rey, and a million other ingredients to effectively produce a profound sense of sadness. I love that song. "Calling Your Name" is little more than the titular phrase and a bassline but it's extremely catchy. "HBT (Hatred Burning Through)" ends with an amazing and complex piano section.
These are some of the highlights of Zeke Berkley's solo output. For the most part, however, both Berkley I & II underwhelm. As a solo artist, Zeke is more cerebral, more concerned with the little details than End Transmission ever was. "You're a musician's musician," our old pal Chris Jay said of Zeke when he was a guest on episode 63 of the Fresh Talk podcast. Translation: dude got boring.
On There's No Time to Explain with Brain Parra, another local podcast, Zeke said:
"On my first record everybody said ‘oh man, it's really cool but, couple things,’ and they'd always hit me with a couple criticisms and one of them that I heard consistently was 'all the songs sound the same.' And so I was like, 'ok.' And for me that's a personal challenge.
[...]
“When multiple people tell me that, that means I have to listen. So what I start doing is thinking about, okay, how can I really really make this a versatile record where I show my range so people know what I'm capable of here?"
Now the songs on Berkley I definitely blur together, though I'd argue that this has more to do with a general lack of adrenaline than it does with instrumental monotony. But the haters have to be proven wrong, so on Berkley II Zeke makes a conscious effort to expand his sound. He largely succeeds. The album is indeed interesting and unique in terms of sonic texture. But other elements of his craft fall by the wayside. His vocals are particularly bad. Berkley II finds Zeke developing an unfortunate tendency to stretch his syllables beyond their breaking points. After a great intro that sounds like deceased rock gods creating a thunderstorm from their perches in heaven, the vocals for opening track "Clouds" begin like this:
Cloooooouuuuuds aaaaaabooooooove theeeeeeey liiiingeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer Traaaaaace theeeeeem wiiiiiith yooooouuuur fiiiiingeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer
"Nightshade" finds Zeke hilariously devoting 4 entire bars, at 97 beats per minute, to the mere two syllables of the titular word before he bothers with any sort of storytelling. What about the nightshade, Zeke? What about the nightshade?!
And then there's "Better Than You". Jesus fucking Christ, this stupid song.
***
An important note about Zeke Berkley: he's full of himself. Don't worry; he freely admits as much. "I think I'm probably one of the most egotistical people," he said on Fresh Talk. It's a statement that comes in the midst of an epic rant against the evils of the local music scene. It began innocently enough. Prefacing the podcast's premiere of "Better than You", Zeke said:
"It's a caricature of a personality type that I believe exists amongst music scenes particularly across the United States but more specifically in this general area. I feel like there's this attitude that exists, and I've certainly embodied it myself, and in fact I am embodying it by even writing a song about it, but you know, I think everybody thinks they're better than everyone else and everybody thinks that they have this thing that no one else does or this hidden knowledge of what actually is real and what constitutes being a band and it's kind of disgusting but it hits everybody I think."
Ok, sure. Fair enough. But as Zeke continues, he becomes angrier, more impassioned:
"What people fail to realize particularly about me is I think some people fucking sleep on me because I've been writing songs for about 12 years now seriously and I’ve been playing just about every instrument on my own stuff for quite a while and so it's just kind of disgusting when I hear someone think that they're better than me."
Caricature clearly doesn't do his feelings on the matter justice. "I'll probably alienate myself hugely here but the truth is I'm not really interested in playing a show with anybody here," the future replacement bassist for Anchor & Bear said. He continued:
“You have this Mumford feeling seeping into this and you get these folk people who realize the fifth folk revival's happening again and it allows them to dictate it and become these people dressed as farm workers or something and I don't get it. I dress like an average person. When you hear my music you're actually hearing what my voice sounds like when I talk. You're not hearing some accent or some impression of anyone else and that's particularly what this song is about. I hear these people do impressions of their favorite singers in these songs.”
It’s certainly true that the range of notes the human voice can hit varies among individuals, and a common issue with aspiring singers is that they imitate other vocalists that they like and never learn to calibrate to what they’re actually capable of. But Zeke conflates this with other criticisms so general that they scan as grudges against the very concepts of genre and style, which is absurd. It’s also a rather disingenuous argument to make after the specific schemas he embraced as a member of End Transmission lost their power to benefit him. Aging! It sucks.
***
"Better Than You" is a terrible song about how supposedly terrible the rest of the local scene is. It begins with drum fills that sound like that boring thing a band does live when the vocalist needs to take a breather. Then Zeke sings:
You think you're better than me You think you're a staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Well you're not better than me Cause I know exactly who you aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrre
There's that elongation thing again. Zeke gives us all this time to anticipate his next move only to reward us with nursery-rhyme-level craft, forcing us to dwell in his predictability. And he has the audacity to do this while calling out other bands for weak songwriting. "And I know every rhyme / that you're about to use", he later sings in the song's first prechorus. Welcome to the club, dude. I saved you a spot.
Speaking of that prechorus, the preceding lines go like this:
And I know the type of thing you compromise on I've heard your shitty rock band
"Band" lands hard, on a one beat, the king of the rhythmic hierarchy because it bears the weight of keeping our ears properly oriented. Important things happen therein, but Zeke pivots away into a distinct vocal section before giving us the closure or resolution the word demands, leaving the listener unsatisfied. And Zeke doesn’t bother to work out a proper outro for the song, merely offering a modified take on its main refrain that misplaces its syllabic emphasis and ending with an unresolved “you,” imbuing the titular phrase with uncertainty when the entire point should be its brashness.
"Better Than You" pits Zeke's ego against his sense of quality control and the latter loses big time. It is, however, one of the few songs on Berkley II that’s convincingly about something. According to Zeke and Brian Parra, heart-on-sleeve songwriting is played out. On There’s No Time to Explain, they have this exchange:
Zeke: “It’s something to be personal and that's definitely a style of songwriting but I think another style of songwriting is being ancillary. Get secondary and then find how to inject yourself into it instead of saying, ‘this is what's going on with my life.’
[...]
“So make yourself about the other thing as opposed to just like, ‘this is me baring my soul’ ‘cause everyone has already done that.”
Brian: “But that gets boring!”
Zeke: ”It Is!”
Brian: “It's like, alright, how many times -”
Zeke: “‘Another soul?!’”
Brian: “Yeah! Right!”
On Fresh Talk, Zeke further explained his approach:
Zeke: “Lyrics are different on this record than my previous stuff.”
Chris: “Is it personal stuff or is it more-”
Zeke: “I’d say my last record was more personal whereas this record was more, I wanna say words and phrases that I like and that sound natural and that I enjoy hearing more than sharing a piece of myself like I did on my first record.”
Chris: “So you let the music dictate the words more?”
Zeke: “That’s exactly right, Chris.”
Of course, any decent musician should be singing phrases that sound good within their musical contexts whether they’re baring their soul or not. Zeke is creating a false dichotomy borne of his deep-rooted desire to separate himself from his peers. That said, his outside-in approach to songwriting isn't necessarily a bad one, and Berkley II’s “Sink” is proof. It’s damn good. But Zeke’s eagerness to justify its existence is telling. Discussing the song on There’s No Time to Explain, he said:
Zeke: “It’s a jaunt. And you’re absolutely right it’s ragtimey because I was thinking, you want me to be versatile? You’re telling me I need to be more versatile? Who the fuck has a ragtime old time black and white movie train tracks rescue, you know what I mean?”
Brian: “It is a little like that, yeah!”
Zeke: “Who’s gonna have that?”
Tough one! Regis, how many lifelines do I have left?
Aping a style of music that peaked in popularity a century ago is a distinctly Zeke-ian take on versatility. Surely even the butterfly Scott Joplin was reincarnated as has Taylor Swift set to repeat by now. Don't get me wrong; to reiterate, "Sink" is great, ragtime intro and all. But it also exemplifies Zeke's performative, try-hard posturing, striking me as an anti-gimmick gimmick that conveniently allows him a certain peace of mind regarding his continued efforts to carve a space for himself as a musician by creating distance from the grind of trend chasing and the attention economy as a shortcut to originality.
Of course, you're currently reading How to Listen to Music, sworn enemy of originality.
Wait. Shit.
***
“Music is exclusively a challenge to me. I approach it in the same way that I would approach basketball or I would approach your golf swing or something like that and I think for a lot of people it's like ‘oh yeah, music’s life’ and all this stuff and no, music’s work. It's supposed be hard work. You're supposed to work really hard on it and you're supposed to get better at it every time you do it.”
Zeke said this on There's No Time to Explain with Brian Parra. It's bullshit, of course. There are no laws dictating how every person on the planet needs to approach the art and craft of creating music. Nonetheless, it's a quote that has stuck with me.
Zeke Berkley may be the most narcissistic musician in Ventura County. But his public battle with the contradiction between creativity and community is fascinating, his palpable disdain for mediocrity admirable and refreshing. I may not like Berkley I or II all that much but I’m glad they exist.
*quotes edited for length & clarity
