Review: Cormorant – Earth Diver

Posted on November 4, 2014 by necromoonyeti

Cormorant are a 4-piece San Francisco Bay band formed in 2007. They released their third studio album, Earth Diver, back in April of this year. Lacking major ties to any other band I have heard of, it’s probably no surprise that they stayed off my radar until now, but this is a band that definitely deserves some attention. Their well-crafted mix of folk, progressive rock, post-rock, and black metal sets a high standard at the cutting edge of metal today. While Earth Diver may possess a fatal flaw, it offers a world of potential that few bands can hope to realize.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqevYzJrhks

Cormorant – Daughter of Void, from Earth Diver

Earth Diver opens with “Eris”, a two and a half minute instrumental folk guitar track with a bit of a Spanish flare. As nice as the song sounds in and of itself, I am not convinced that it was the ideal choice for their opener. The second track, “Daughter of Void”, kicks off acoustic as well, and with the two tracks combined, the intro just seems a bit overdrawn. Don’t worry though; that’s the last time I’ll be complaining about the album’s structure. The acoustic portion of “Daughter of Void” sets the stage nicely and gets us straight to the point without much delay, kicking the metal side of the song off theatrically. We start with a nice metal groove lacking any of the repetitiveness you might expect from a band with the “black” tag, and at two minutes their prog tendencies start to show. Black metal vocals give way to something reminiscent of Opeth or Mastodon, and the song shifts through a variety of genre norms without really breaking from the overall feel. The song hits a peak at 4:05 with an Amorphis-esque vocal melody and a really catchy rhythmic hook. The bending tremolo behind the vocals starting at 5:35 is sick, and they build on it further at 6:25. The song is just packed with little standout moments that never last long enough to seem like overkill. (The youtube video ends early, but you’re only missing eight seconds.)

This is the sort of track you could easily remember from start to finish, if you could get in to it enough to care. If. The down side to “Daughter of Void” is a fairly mediocre production job that fails to really pull me in. I can hear everything clearly enough, but I can’t really feel it. They are going for classic low-key grit over big, booming sounds, and I get that, but it feels pretty washed out. The sort of sound Agalloch accomplished with Ronn Chick on Pale Folklore could have pushed this song from above average to outstanding.

Funny fact I didn’t realize until I wrote this: Cormorant actually do share some production history with Agalloch. They work with Justin Weis, who did a notoriously shitty job on Marrow of the Spirit. Go figure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoeqDqIvqwQ

Cormorant – Sold as a Crow, from Earth Diver

“Sold as a Crow” has a very different feel about it. We kick off with some delicious post-black metal. A pretty tremolo melody warps into a desperate cry as the distortion and blast beats kick into gear. The snare does not always feel quite on point with the guitar, but Lev Weinstein might just have me spoiled in that department. This is the kind of black metal I live for. I love the single-beat stop at 1:46 and 2:00. I love the harmony at 1:50 and 2:05. I love the octave shift at 1:52. I love the three seconds of guitar flare at 1:55. This constant barrage of subtle nuances tends to distinguish post-black metal from its ancestor, and it’s the reason I can recall every note of a 15-minute Krallice composition while an Immortal track might fade into the back of my mind in seconds.

At 2:36 the main melody returns with a sort of flowing, jazzy feel, and then the majority of the song repeats. We get some new variation at 4:03 as build-up to a minute of soloing to close out the track. Maybe because the ending doesn’t appeal to me quite as readily, the production of the album starts to eat at me again. It still feels a bit of a wash, lacking depth or crispness without a good reason. I can appreciate “Sold as a Crow”. I can love listening attentively to every note from every instrument, especially in the first two and a half minutes. But I’m left without that desire to hear it again, right goddamn now. I can never listen to a whole Krallice album at once, because I always get stuck on a track and set it to repeat ad nauseam. “Sold as a Crow” could have been a song like that, but its beautiful structure is not matched by compelling tonal quality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1XiAg0XDs

Cormorant – Broken Circle, from Earth Diver

What you’re not going to hear on Earth Diver is more of the same. This isn’t the sort of album where I can describe two or three tracks and feel like I’ve summed the collective up well. Every song is a masterfully complex beast unto its own. With Opeth always on the tip of my tongue, peppered by Amorphis, Agalloch, and Krallice, Cormorant manage to remind me of a lot of the most unique bands in metal without ever paralleling any of them for long or losing its own unique flavor. “Broken Circle” has jazzy acoustic guitar a la My Arms Your Hearse Opeth, straight-up in-your-face black metal, a break to a distinct Orchid-era Opeth sound at 3:29, brief allusions to math rock, and a world in between. When the singer isn’t barking in classic black metal fashion, he might be pulling off his best Pasi Koskinen or Mikael Åkerfeldt impression, letting out a bellowing roar, or even shouting at the top of his lungs (2:04). You can often catch the bass running wild, sounding especially like Johan De Farfalla during the Orchid moment (why oh why did Mikael fire that man?). But as many band references as I can throw out there, the majority of “Broken Circle” sounds like Cormorant’s own unique creation.

And yet. And yet I can’t pull this album in and hold it close for long. What struck me as mediocre production from the start begins to feel like a travesty in the face of such absolutely brilliant compositions. This album was robbed of its well-deserved glory by a quality of sound that totally ostracizes me. I keep cranking the volume up louder and louder, hoping that I am just not experiencing it immersively enough to feel the pull. But it’s never there. Oh, it doesn’t sound half as bad as the transcoded garbage you’re hearing in these youtube samples. It would be fine for an average, run-of-the-mill album. But Earth Diver is not that. It deserved above-average attentiveness–something carefully crafted to showcase their sound in all of its uniqueness. I can’t help but think that if Colin Marston had gotten his hands on this raw potential it would have been molded into the best album of 2014.

Ten Years #48: Opeth

Posted on May 20, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
48. Opeth (640 plays)
Top track (26 plays): The Devil’s Orchard, from Heritage (2011)

When I saw Opeth was coming up next, I got pretty excited about what the top track would be. Would my really oldschool Opeth credentials shine with a song like The Twilight is My Robe or Advent topping the charts, or could nothing hope to match Demon of the Fall? A Heritage track was the last thing I ever expected. It’s easy to forget, in the onslaught of relatively poor reviews, how much I actually enjoyed that album when it came out. Oh, it wasn’t love at first listen, but for me it was a breath of fresh air after years of diminishing faith in Akerfeldt’s song-writing ability. Opeth was one of the first metal bands I ever listened to, and, nostalgia aside, I really do think their first three albums were by far their best. A void, beginning subtly with Still Life and expanding more drastically after Blackwater Park, had grown between my personal tastes and the direction Akerfeldt was steering the band. This coupled with what I perceived as an overinflated ego to completely erode my interest in the band for a long time. Ghost Reveries and Watershed only managed four and three listens respectively before I yawned and moved on.

I am not much of a progressive rock fan, but with Heritage I did start to feel like Akerfeldt was coming back to earth and keeping it real again. I don’t know about his whole “I’m done with metal” mentality; it seems to me like he’s exactly where he needs to be to start composing the sort of metal I can enjoy again. But even if prog rock is all that’s going to appear under the Opeth moniker for a long time to come, his decision to tone things down has successfully resurrected my interest. The Devil’s Orchard is my most played Opeth song because these charts do not begin until 2003; a few years earlier and the statistics would reflect something quite different. But suffice to say I do think this is the best Opeth album since Blackwater Park.

I’ll leave you with a classic Opeth track of the sort that made these guys, for a pre-last.fm period of four years or so, my favorite band in the world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpUfPP4KyRE

Review: Opeth – Heritage

Posted on October 1, 2011 by necromoonyeti

It’s been about a month now since I first acquired a copy of Heritage. I rather wish I’d reviewed it sooner, since my opinions ultimately never really changed. I really liked it on my first listen, and I like it to about the same extent, or perhaps slightly more, for about the same reasons now. Its reception hasn’t really changed either. Labeled pretty much from the start as Opeth’s worst album to date, it continues to wrack up impressively low scores across the board. (The average Encyclopaedia Metallum review is 54%, where no other Opeth album has failed to break at least 75%.) Either popular opinion has placed my presumed disposition towards good taste in dire jeopardy, or else I’m just approaching this from a wildly different perspective than the average listener. I am inclined to believe the latter.

Unfortunately, I cannot treat this as a normal Through the Shattered Lens review. That is, I cannot showcase particular songs via youtube and describe which elements really stand out to me for better and for worse. The band has been pretty forceful lately about preventing any and all means to experience their studio albums without first paying them. I’ll spare you a rant on antiquated copyright laws and record label monopolies, but suffice to say a musician’s attitude towards listeners will always be reflected in some capacity in the music. Whether Akerfeldt (signing to a notorious record label is no excuse) is too selfish or simply too oblivious to respect the means by which he became a celebrity in the first place, there is an over-inflated ego at work here.

But that wasn’t news to me. Really it shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s listened to Roundhouse Tapes and endured the six minutes of dialogue wrapping up the live version of Blackwater Park. (It’s always lame and cliche to mock-hype yourself up to be a celebrity, but it ceases to be tongue in cheek when you really are a celebrity.) At any rate I started losing interest when they released Deliverance, and by Ghost Reveries they were one of those “I really respect them, I just can’t get into their new sound” bands.

So I guess the first big difference between me and, well, pretty much everybody else, was my only thinly-veiled conviction that Opeth were no longer very good. I had absolutely zero expectations, so any mediocrity apparent in Heritage burst no bubbles for me. Rather, it being immediately clear that Heritage was not the sort of album I expected to hear, I ended up listening to it almost as though they were a brand new band. As such, I really can’t find fault in it. Sure, it’s not groundbreaking. It’s unlikely (though not out of the realm of possibility) that it will make my top 10 of the year charts when all is said and done. But damnit, this is a fun, creative, thoroughly entertaining album, and under any other band name I think it would earn fairly positive reviews. Unfortunately, urging people to listen to it with an “open mind” would be pointless, because it’s Opeth. There is no getting around its place in history. If you really liked Watershed it’s unlikely you will enjoy it.

If I could sample the songs here like usual I would treat this whole article differently. I would completely ignore the fact that it’s Opeth, point out all of my favorite bits and pieces, maybe make passing references to the cheesy lyrics and the possibility that they could have done away with a few unnecessary transitions which fail to fit the big picture, and save any mention of the band behind the album until the very end. Hell, maybe I’d say nothing at all and save a rant such as this for a completely separate follow-up article, just to make a point. But since that is not an option, and traditional reviews aren’t my style, the rant will stand alone.

One review I read quoted Akerfeldt as saying “I think you’ll need a slightly deeper understanding of our music as a whole to be able to appreciate this record.” The reviewer’s relative point was not particularly kind, and perhaps mine won’t be either, but I honestly find the quote precisely on the mark. Akerfeldt isn’t some rock solid icon of metal, unyielding and impervious. He’s no Lemmy, no Bruce Dickinson. Perhaps his last few albums were heavy and aggressive enough to make people think otherwise, but what they reflected for me was something quite the opposite–a sort of susceptibility to musical trends, overbearing producers, and well-deserved fame. It was a softness, almost a sort of frailty, that made Orchid, Morningrise, and My Arms Your Hearse so breathtaking, and the more he matured and rose to stardom the more that authenticity faded away, to be replaced eventually by dynamic-driven death metal of the popular sort that only excelled in perfecting a genre with little to no redeeming value to begin with. I think some of his original spirit has resurfaced on Heritage, albeit only slightly and in a very different form. Akerfeldt dumped off a lot of baggage when he chose to create Heritage the way he did, and from what I’ve gathered in interviews, he doesn’t intend to turn back. In retrospect, I’m pretty excited to see what will follow as the leech of popularity upon his creative genius begins to contemplate younger blood. But that wasn’t my first impression. Initially, abandoning all expectations, I just heard something pretty groovy and got into it.