THE ELECTRIC BIBLE | CHAPTER 489

Weakling – whose name was reportedly derived from a track on the first Swans album, Filth – delivered the most entertaining noise-metal album of the late decade by creating it in a style based on the European black metal of a few years earlier. The resulting 5-track, 78-minute opus was a “black noise” epic which pushes the style’s limits of endurance to breaking-point with track durations of up to twenty minutes each, almost stretching into the realms of ambient metal. Weakling released no further recordings, and Dead As Dreams is perhaps better viewed as a one-time coda to the ancient black metal cult, rather than a precursor to the doubtless unlistenable efforts it may have inspired in the incipient age of recycling and vacuous pastiche.