Weakling - Obscene black-metal disasters

A shooting star. One of those that leave an indelible mark. Few bands in the metal world have recorded so little (a single 5-track album, 76 minutes of music in total) and branded an entire "scene" (in this specific case, that of United States Black Metal, or USBM) so deeply. Wolves In Throne Room, Nachtmystium, L’Acephale, Fauna, Fell Voices, etc…, are all bands that, in one way or another, owe something to the "progressive" fusion of the most feral and atmospheric sides of black-metal pioneered by the San Francisco band. Yet, over time, the hallucinatory pathos running through their music has also reverberated through other "metal" experiences.

“I never dream. This isn’t real. Not real” (Swans, “Weakling”)

The key character in our story is named John Gossard.

Raised in Kensington, in the Bay Area, Gossard first became interested in metal thanks to his sister's records; she was a fan of, among others, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Rush. Every now and then, he'd also mess around on the piano. Then, after breaking his leg in a skateboarding accident, his father gave him a guitar to cheer him up.

"One of the kids on my street played guitar in Lääz Rockit [a thrash-metal band; ed.]. I couldn't play anything back then. So this guy started giving me lessons, and I even ended up at one of their shows. They were opening for Slayer (it was around the time of 'Show No Mercy', if I remember correctly), a band that literally blew my mind!" After this revelation, John began developing an increasingly unbridled passion for "extreme" sounds, falling first for hardcore (Black Flag above all), then death-metal, Swans, and so on, right up to black-metal (the fateful trigger being a compilation a friend gave him, which also featured the first two Venom albums). He went on to play in the thrashers Vomitorium, dabbled in punk with Dripping Mary, and in the meantime began nursing the idea of forming a band of his own. With Jim Mack, he put together the first lineup of what would later become Black Goats. However, once back in the Bay Area, now with a drug problem on top of everything else, John lost some of his interest in music. The San Francisco scene, among other things, didn't satisfy him, and he entered a period of "withdrawal".

Having sorted out his problems, he went to live in an apartment shared with the two Fucking Champs guitarists, Tim Green and Josh Smith. "One night, Josh and I realized we'd never played a single note together, so we turned on the amps and started improvising. That first time, we wrote the ending of 'Disasters In The Sun'. We recorded it on cassette and listened to it for at least a couple of weeks. I hadn't felt that inspired in years! We wanted to form a band, but we didn't know anyone who could also play black-metal! The only people I could have tried with were the Black Goats, but I'd already left them, partly because each of them had their own favorite genre and tended to make the band's sound a bit too schizophrenic. Then, one evening, while Josh was on tour with Fucking Champs, I saw a local band live, Sangre Amado. Their drummer was named Sam Foster [nicknamed 'Little Sunshine'; ed.], and I instantly realized he had to be one of us! So I left him a couple of tapes of my stuff with Josh. Then I went looking for a bassist. Josh introduced me to Sarah Weiner. I was a bit hesitant, because I thought a girl couldn't play black-metal... and instead, she could, and how!"

Meanwhile, the lineup was rounded out by the arrival of keyboardist Casey Ward. "We started working hard, and after a month and a half, Sam joined us too. The first thing we focused on, obviously, was the ending section of 'Disasters In The Sun', the one I'd written during that first jam with Josh. We were going for something like Darkthrone's 'Transilvanian Hunger', and within five minutes we'd finished the part. Then came 'This Entire Fucking Battlefield', a track I'd written back in the early days of Black Goats."

The chosen moniker, Weakling, was a tribute to the Swans song featured on 'Filth'. "Around 1986-87, I bought a compilation that also featured Michael Gira's band. It was the first time I'd ever heard of them. That track was the heaviest moment on the compilation, as well as one of the heaviest things I'd ever heard."

In 1998, at Louder Studios in San Francisco, the four of them recorded the material for their first album, Dead As Dreams. Things seemed to be going well, but shortly after, everything fell apart. "I don't know," John recalls. "It's all very strange. When we recorded the album, we gave it everything we had. We were very proud of the result. But nothing came of it... because the others decided to leave the band for other commitments. The first to go was Sam, who at the time was still busy with Sangre Amado, as well as his job (he was a courier). After a while, everyone else followed. I tried to convince them to stay, but even though they recognized the album's worth, they told me they just weren't interested anymore. And I felt betrayed."

Once recording was finished, Gossard was left on his own, with an album of devastating potential but no distribution. It took two years for things to finally fall into place. In 1999, also in San Francisco, Andee Connors launched tUMULt Records, starting out by putting out records of varying interest. He eventually got in touch with Gossard, looking for the big score: "John was obsessed with the idea of becoming a cult figure," Andee recalls. "To convince him to let me release 'Dead As Dreams', I suggested including a map inside the CD case, so that once you ordered the record, you could use the map to find the place where the CD was buried. John was really excited about this idea, but actually pulling it off was a bit complicated... So I thought about just putting out a single copy, going to some European festival, and giving it to some fifteen-year-old kid. Kind of a 'limited edition' type of thing!"

The story is so absurd that John himself, in an interview a few years back, ended up getting pretty worked up about it, accusing Andee of making up the whole tale out of thin air and spreading it around without bothering to check with him first. Be that as it may, anecdotes of this kind, whether true or not, only ended up fuelling the curiosity and mystery surrounding the name Weakling, so much so that the album was finally released by tUMULt in 2000 (initially in a limited vinyl edition).

Meanwhile, John had gone back to making music with The Gault, a project balancing gothic-psychedelic leanings, doom metal and noise-rock. The band's line-up, which quickly became "the most hated band in San Francisco" and, in the leader's own words, "the typical kind of band you listen to alone at home", was rounded out, alongside the returning Sarah Weiner, by bassist Lorraine Rath (later in Amber Asylum) and the mysterious singer Ed "Dead" Kunakemakorn. Their only album, "Even As All Before Us", released in 2005 on Amortout, deserves to be rediscovered. Once that experience ended, it was time for the funeral doom of Asunder, and then a return to his roots with the black metal of Dispirit.

In the meantime, keyboardist Casey Ward had thrown himself into garage-rock revivalism with The Husbands, while these days you'll find Sam Foster in the ranks of death metal outfit Saros. Josh Smith, meanwhile, besides continuing his adventure with Fucking Champs, would also play in Drunk Horse.

“Perché noi siamo solo la buccia e la foglia/ La grande morte, che ognuno ha in sé/ è il frutto, attorno a cui ogni cosa ruota”

(R. M. Rilke)

An early version of Dead As Dreams (5 tracks; 76:09) can be heard on the demo Live Practice, 52 minutes of music with Gossard's vocals practically buried beneath the roar of the instruments. The sound quality is far from bad and already hints at the sheer quality of the songs (though the very long title track is missing). Another demo, Rehearsal (also from 1998), contains only a very first version, barely ten minutes long, of "This Entire Fucking Battlefield". The presence of purely instrumental tracks wasn't a stylistic choice but rather a reflection of the difficulty in finding a vocalist capable of matching music so epic and devastating at once. As John recalls: "We looked for a singer for a long time, but with no luck. So, in the end, I told myself: 'Fuck it, I'll do it all myself!' I felt comfortable with black-metal screams and I didn't really care if I ended up sounding ridiculous — actually, I found it interesting that, most of the time, people were scared by it. We'd prepare a couple of songs, we'd look for a singer... or rather, someone who could just scream. Nothing doing. So it was either me singing or no singer at all. At first, I found it hard to play guitar and sing at the same time. I couldn't concentrate. Then I set myself a goal: don't think. Be visceral and try to achieve the darkest, most unsettling effect possible."

This goal led John to prioritize emotional impact over choosing precisely defined words. In short, a preference for a tortured signifier charged with a Luciferian passion over a bare, raw signified... "I lived for a long time with someone who worked in linguistics. So I was heavily influenced by the emotions that filter through words. Weakling's songs generally had just one concept expressed per section. I drew inspiration from Darkthrone and Burzum, whose lyrics had a pretty remarkable poetic undercurrent. Still, even though I was quite fascinated by the possibility of telling a story, I tended more towards letting the purity of the emotions filter through. Having no answers to give, I ended up trusting the passion I was able to convey. Passion is everything!"

John isn't entirely wrong. Just listen to the opening of "Cut Their Grain and Place Fire Therein" (10:28), the opening track whose impact is utterly overwhelming. A massive riff, like a call to arms, anguished screams, those guitar bolts seething muddy, filthy, "garage"-like, as if some wild old backwater band had suddenly decided to raise the stakes, spilling its guts on the floor through an epic superstructure capable of raising suffering and pain to the status of a banner of revolt. The role of the keyboards has been slightly scaled back compared to the demo, to the benefit of a better overall sound. The track slowly decelerates, but Gossard's screams grow even more harrowing and jarring amid an ugly, and needless to say infernal, bacchanal, building bridges towards almost occult, pitch-black dimensions, while the guitars trade tremolo-picked solos, slicing across the stage from end to end, before everything dissolves into a cosmic vortex. Then, without a break, the extremely long title track resurfaces (20:39), opened by a melancholy, lush arpeggio with viking-metal roots but clear post-rock undertones. Then, as the intensity of the electric wall-of-sound becomes ever more unbearable (vertiginous climbs give way to progressive passages, digressions chase and intertwine with one another), the album's core themes (misanthropy, pain, anguish, madness, desolation, etc.) are all traversed with an allegorical force so intense it instils terror. Having reached the furthest edge of his nihilism, Gossard resurfaces with blinding tornadoes of emotion that the various instrumental vanishing points help refine, also leaning on sharper, more pronounced breaks, perhaps accentuated by very brief, ritualistic interludes. By around the fourteenth minute, the epic serpent hurls itself disastrously towards the abyss, tumbling furiously first along a throbbing percussive path and then against an ever more "all-consuming" sonic wall. A long instrumental break (circular tom-tom drumming, opposing and converging masses of riffs, panoramic expanses of "static" harmonies) finally leads this monstrous monolith out of the tunnel.

Weakling's dramatic art lies entirely in these twenty minutes made of fresh blood and entrails left to decompose on the asphalt.

And yet, the epic essence of the monumental riff in "This Entire Fucking Battlefield" (14:47) is probably even more intense and harrowing. Within it lie Nordic plains, imaginary battlefields, the "hammerheart" of Bathory translated into a game of feverish obsessions and suffocating psychic upheavals. All of this is cast into the incandescent magma of an ostentatious grandiloquence, amid orgiastic detours, guitar tones growing ever darker and more pestilential, a lyrical interlude that sets up an ending (from the eleventh minute onwards) that's as heart-wrenching as they come, with a spiralling solo and symphonic keyboards exponentially heightening the sense of vertiginous perdition. Gossard's inner torment grows ever more deformed and chilling. His vocal line is made up of small lyrical fragments that, once hinted at, give way to an unstable, raving succession of subhuman utterances, alienating barks, mournful anguish. Like a beast roaming through the darkness of its own soul, in search of a final, "intimate" apocalypse, right in the middle of deafening spectral trances.

No sooner than the blink of an eye, and the "obscene" "No One Can Be Called As a Man While He'll Die" (13:09) explodes with supernatural force. Yet another tragedy unfolding in real time (which disintegrates into an epileptic, delirious finale — think the most deranged Grifters of "So Happy Together" progressively falling apart in a self-destructive Abruptum-like ritual...), this track treads (with an even sharper emphasis on the morbid timbral interplay of the two guitars and the bass of an ever more commendable Sarah Weiner, despite Gossard's initial doubts) along the chasm separating the hell of life from the inexpressible mystery of death, redrawing the very concept of black metal around a lyricism of the ineffable that had already reached its first creative peaks in Burzum's most experimental work (one of the clearest influences on the whole album). The closer is "Disasters In The Sun" (17:06), whose intro strides majestically through a scorching funeral-doom haze, with shimmering, swirling guitar work. Then comes the headlong rush, like a single battalion devoted to collective suicide. The questioning echo of the distortion within the void. The cosmic dissonances. The outpouring of feedback that seals the chill of an invisible farewell.

Here there are no more churches left to burn. No more crosses to overturn, nor bigots left to intimidate.

Frivolities, before a soul that keeps on bleeding...

(17/04/2011)

In memory of Biagio Casalino, twenty years old

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