### Weakling: Dead as dreams

#### 27/08/09 || Khlysty

Of all the bands that tried to cut their teeth into black metal in the US of fucking A, Weakling remain the most impressive, short-lived and fucking brilliant of the lot. Their only “proper” recording, the extremely long and convoluted “Dead As Dreams”, even today, eleven years after its recording and nine years after its release –with the band already split one year before it saw the sickly light of day…- still stands strong, a virtual provocation to anyone and everyone and a high watermark on what black metal can be.

Weakling’s approach towards their chosen musical genre was so intriguing, so complex and so fucking ambitious, that one can really hear the songs groaning and trembling under their own weight. These five compositions –ranging from 10 to 21 minutes- seem like a real pissing down on everything that black metal was supposed to be. Oh, yeah, don’t worry; you’ll get your tremolo picking, your blasting, your wailing/howling/screeching vocals, your lo-fi production. But, you know what? That’s only the icing. The REAL razors hide underneath the black metal trappings.

The band’s take on black metal is one that –maybe…- King Crimson at their most paranoid, or Pink Floyd at their most misanthropic might have chosen to do, had they been able to take part to black metal’s merry-go-round. Each song is a small suite of sorts, with at least three different parts that intertwine, fight with each other, break apart and recombine into yet more exotic and frightening configurations. The riffs are almost in constant flux, the time signatures move from paranoid-military to almost-power-metal-bravado, to ambient non-existence, to black metal white-outs (pun intended, you fuckers…), while the extremely idiosyncratic production, even though generally pretty opaque, nonetheless leaves fractions of breathing space for the instrumentation (sometimes one can ACTUALLY HEAR THE BASS!!!).

The band’s quirks don’t lie only in composition and production, though. All the time, there’s something going on in the songs: a change in the guitars’ sound timbre, a shredding solo coming out of nowhere, only to be replaced by a rhythmic onslaught, a majestic keyboard intro that gives way to a flanged guitar melody of utter beauty and desolation (this shit is just the intro of the song “Dead As Dreams”), followed by a broken down, heartbroken waltz, followed by… fuck, I won’t tell you anything more. You have to LISTEN to this record, carefully and attentively, because shit happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME, shit of unspeakable ugliness and indescribable beauty.

When I listen to newer USBM bands (say, Wolves In The Throne Room, the latest shit from Nachtmystium, Cobalt, et. al), I cannot but think of how much these guys owe to Weakling. “Dead As Dreams” opened new black vistas for the genre, while redefining it and pushing it so much forward that, I think, it’s a good thing that Weakling broke up: this record is a total touchdown and I cannot imagine how they could have created something its equal –to better it seems almost impossible. This is black metal at its most left-brained and unapproachable, but also at its creative peak. This is an untouchable record and if you don’t own it, I would suggest that you remedy this deficiency immediately…

- Information
- Released: 2000
- Label: tUMULt
- Website: none
- Band
- John Gossard: guitars, vocals
- Casey Ward: keyboards
- Sam Foster (a.k.a. Little Sunshine): drums
- Sarah Weiner: bass
- Josh Smith: guitar

- Tracklist
- 01. Cut Their Grain and Place Fire Therein
- 02. Dead as Dreams
- 03. This Entire Fucking Battlefield
- 04. No One can be called as a Man While He’ll Die
- 05. Disasters in the Sun