Weakling - Dead as Dreams

It seems that the best black metal tends to revel in obscurity. Why else would they want their logos to be so unreadable? Kidding aside, a better way of putting is that usually quality black metal tends to have the same feeling that only so-called ''outsider music" tends to capture. If it's going to be fulfilling musical pretensions and rival GG Allin or Man is the Bastard for the top spot in the scariest-music-ever category, it certainly doesn't hurt to sound like a bunch of murderers with a four track. That may sound like image over music, but the reality is that the musical quality tends to go hand in hand with the crafted or un-crafted mystery of the bands. It's a fiercely uncompromising genre when its at its best and that goes for the music as well as the image. San Francisco's Weakling followed in the footsteps of the second-wave Scandinavian bands in terms of being totally uncompromising did without the corpse paint, church burnings and fascism. With Weakling its about music and music alone in the purest sense and Dead as Dreams is wonderfully frightening music indeed. In fact, they opted for not having an image at all, much like Japan's equally punk doom-metallers Corrupted. Fenriz of Darkthrone would argue at the heart of black metal is punk ethics, anyway. The band even supposedly got their name from a song by the Swans. Weakling unfortunately vanished very quickly, but not before releasing one album of utterly harrowing metallic brutality. Much more than a black metal band, Weakling were a crossover hybrid of hardcore and black metal, and with Nation of Ulysses's Tim Green at the mixing board helm it certainly enhanced that element of their music. Very subtle traces of arty-hardcore is definitely in Weakling's incredibly dense and sprawling compositions, which is sure to please fans of the Gravity and Dischord rosters. Perhaps more directly they take the keyboard atmospherics of Emperor but ditch In the Nightside Eclipse's 'clean' production in favor of the less produced aesthetics of black metal classics like Transilvanian Hunger, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and Filosofem. There is also certainly elements of droning doom metal, and one of the band's members later even surfaced in the band Asunder. Dead as Dreams came out in 2000 (recorded in '98) and far under the radar, at a time when cheesy bands like Cradle of Filth were getting put on the Ozzfest tour and the meaning of black metal to the mainstream music consciousness became a mall-goth mutation. Amongst the metal scene there is plenty of overproduced formulaic crap that gets passed as 'true black metal.' But in the early 90s this genre meant something different in Norway, and ten years before that it meant the punk and Motorhead influenced Venom and Celtic Frost. Weakling to a certain extent contribute to keeping that "outsider music" element of black metal alive, certainly along with Darkthrone who don't even tour (Weakling never did either). Furthermore, the epic progressive element to their black metal with 20 minute songs certainly takes a queue from Burzum and Ulver in that regard. John Gossard's anguishing screams over the shredding and blast beats sound like his soul is being ripped out of him, Thankfully, for those of you who listen and still want more of this, there are excellant bands like Wolves in the Throne Room that got ahold of this sound and have expanded on it, creating a whole legion of proggy ambient lo-fi black metal bands. However it's unlikely any of them willl be able to truly recapture the frightening beauty of this groundbreaking album, released on Tumult Records (2000).