Weep – The Constant Strain of Life Review

My schooling and professional experience is in the making and teaching of visual fine art, and every once in a while this music reviewing gig reveals close parallels to consider. As I listen to Minneapolis-based one-man blackgaze project Weep and his debut full-length The Constant Strain of Life, I’m reminded of the differences between drawing and painting. Most artists who paint, draw, and vice versa value each medium for different reasons. Painting is a somewhat major production with lots of moving parts. There are layers. If you don’t like a mark, you paint over it, and it becomes part of a nearly invisible self-contained history. Painting builds or obfuscates spatial illusion in a push-and-pull process. Color theory has to be considered. Drawing is much more immediate. It can be detailed and meticulous, but it’s comparatively uncomplicated. There’s the hand, the tool, and the mark on the surface. It’s like seeing someone think out loud. Musical equivalents are like this: progressive death metal is painting. Raw black metal is drawing. Big band jazz is painting, but John Coltrane going on long improvised tangents on his sax is drawing.

The Constant Strain of Life is, in our dichotomy, drawing. Weep’s lone member, Cerastes, runs post-punk and shoegaze through a raw black metal filter but without the raw part. Comparisons can be made to fellow Minnesota bands Ashbringer or Wishfield, but this is a much more stripped-down, straightforward affair. How stripped down? If you had told me this was a demo, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. There are a few points of stylistic variation, like “Coffin Varnish,” which leans into doom tempos and solemnity, while “Desaturated Soul,” commits completely to shoegaze. One gets the idea that Cerastes has listened to a fair bit of screamo, but thankfully that influence on Weep is more residual than overt. The Constant Strain of Life spends the vast majority of its time squarely in that “post-black” space.

Cerastes’ “just the facts, ma’am” style contributes to both the album’s charm and its weaknesses. Production-wise, each instrument sits side by side with the others rather than combines with them. One can almost see every note played floating in space. This works fine on songs like the two that open the album. “Late Autumn” and “Must We Continue” both rely on buoyant indie rock guitar lines played over blackened rhythms to give them an immediate hook. When heft and urgency are needed, however, that space between elements becomes an issue. Take the title track. Once the song kicks into third gear and the chugging guitar riff starts at the 1:30 mark, it’s all too sparse a sound to convey the weight Weep is going for. It doesn’t do enough to raise the intensity, so the breakdown that follows also fails to land. This happens again with “The Sour Scent of Ozone,” as the chugging riff over the programmed drum d-beat comes off as flat-footed rather than energetic. More experimentation with the guitar tone could have potentially helped this. The tone, and indeed the riff, feel too stock-standard.

The issue of seemingly stock riffs emerges elsewhere, from “Late Autumn” to “Coffin Varnish” and “This is the End,” adding to the demo-like quality mentioned above. There are plenty of times listening to The Constant Strain of Life when I wonder why Cerates didn’t just commit to true raw black metal. It wouldn’t fix some of the writing issues, but it would imbue texture and atmosphere that the record could seriously benefit from. The Constant Strain of Life is best when it splits the poles between stark post-punk and black metal. “Must We Continue” is an early highlight and an example of the simple riffs coming off as effortless rather than uninspired. The strongest run starts with the one true shoegaze song “Desaturated Soul” and ends with another post-punk leaning song in album closer “Choosing to Live.” The clean vocals on “Desaturated Soul” are pitch-perfect for the style and I wish Weep would incorporate them more often for contrast and variety.

The Constant Strain of Life may be drawing in our drawing/painting dichotomy, but it alternates between drawing-as-finished-piece and sketchbook entries. Stark, blackened post-punk suits Cerates wonderfully, but more layers and color are needed when Weep reaches for bigger emotional payoffs, or when raging speed is required. There’s some good playlist material here, but as a full-length album, it could use some more time on the easel.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Liminal Dread Productions
Website: weep.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: October 25th, 2024

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