专辑简介

by William York

Weakling was not a band who did things halfway. They reportedly spent two years writing and practicing material for their set list before ever playing a live show, and listening to this album that doesn't seem unreasonable. The five songs on this album range from ten to 20 minutes long, each moving through multiple sections and employing dense, Wall of Sound guitar parts with layers of subtle details and harmonic ambiguities happening beneath the surface. In you listen to this music, say, from the next room in your house, all you can really make out is a washed-out wall of fuzz with some guy (that would be vocalist John Gossard) shrieking over the top. But there is, of course, much more to it than that. Their overall sound, a black metal-as-ambient Wall of Noise approach coupled with an epic songwriting style, certainly owes something to Norwegian bands such as Darkthrone, Burzum, and Immortal, as well as Sweden's Opeth (no strangers to 20-minute songs themselves), but Weakling took those influences and made them into something of their own. The standout track is also the longest, "Dead As Dreams," which begins with a wash of keyboards and then a drawn-out, lamenting guitar prelude before a dramatic, twisting, and utterly heartbroken guitar riff enters at about the three-minute mark; when the drums finally kick in, it is incredibly powerful. It is this kind of dynamic songwriting that lets the band get away with writing such long songs without becoming boring. Taken as a whole, Dead As Dreams is not an easy album to get into, not only because it's emotionally demanding but also since it takes a bunch of listens just to get a handle on all the songwriting twists and turns, but it's a worthwhile investment for anyone interested in hypnotic, epic metal.