Weakling

[week-ling]

Weakling was a progressive–atmospheric black metal band from San Francisco. The band never toured and released only one album, Dead As Dreams, recorded in 1998 and released on tUMUlt Records in 2000. Prior to the release of this album, a few odd tales sprung up about the possible ways the album could be distributed, including printing a single copy to be given to a single fan in Europe or burying copies of the album in the ground and giving maps to fans who wanted to find them. Band leader John Gossard has since decried the spread of these stories as a publicity stunt pulled by the band's record label, noting that the ideas were never intended to be more than a joke between the band members.

Initially, Weakling was mainly noted for featuring guitarist Josh Smith of The Fucking Champs (fellow champ Tim Green served as producer), but a recent reissue of their material has brought their work quite a bit more attention, and the album has been hailed in some circles as a masterpiece. Weakling's sound displays quite a bit of debt to the work of Scandinavian bands like Bathory, Burzum and Darkthrone, as one might imagine it filtered through the lens of '70s progressive rock: All five songs on the seventy-six-minute album run at least ten minutes in length and each is composed of at least two distinct sections.

Gossard and bassist Sarah Weiner later played together in the similarly short-lived doom metal band The Gault (although Weiner was the drummer of that outfit); after that band's demise, Gossard went on to join established funeral doom outfit Asunder. Keyboardist Casey Ward currently plays drums in The Husbands. Drummer Sam Foster currently plays drums for death metal band Saros.

Although Weakling has never officially announced a split, they broke up sometime in 1999.