Basically, Cormorant is one of the most promising newer progressive, extreme metal bands I've heard. Their first album Metazoa is impressive and worthy of its own review, but this one seals the deal. Stylistically, they are generally progressive black metal but draw in a wide range of influences for a sound that manages to be pretty varied and consistently interesting. It's certainly not nice-sounding music, but worth checking out even if extreme metal isn't your thing.
Cormorant isn't a terribly technical band; they put a lot more thought into writing and structuring their songs than into what they can do on the guitar. It's a bit like Opeth's style of braininess, though they don't play on dynamic range nearly as much. Four of the album's seven songs are well over eight minutes in length and really feel like musical journeys with diverse sections and moods. Cormorant's music tends to be riff-focused, but they change things up often enough that it never really gets old.
And the vocals in this album are just incredible. Their vocalist defaults to a hoarse kind of shout that is a good deal more intelligible than average black metal vocals, and also does his share of spoken and cleanly sung vocals. He definitely sings with passion, not just like he's trying to sound "dark" or like other bands. And the lyrics are just amazing. Vocalist and lyricist Arthur von Nagel is a big fan of NPR and apparently wrote several of the songs after listening to news stories. All of them (except the instrumental) have lyrics based on historical or current events, but he makes everything from Guinean war atrocities to the Soviet space program beautiful, dramatic, and really cool if you bother to listen to the lyrics.
"The First Man" starts off with towering chords and a rolling drumbeat before heading off into the relentless, driving riff structure that characterizes much of it. Despite being one of the shorter songs at less than six minutes, it's a great summary of Cormorant's style and would be a solid single if this were that kind of music. The lyrics are about creation myths, the cultures that hold them, and their subjugation by modern settlers; the mellower, almost jazzy bridge is punctuated by a sound clip apologizing for their "past mistreatment."
"Funambulist" ("tightrope walker") begins rather quietly, almost beautifully like a Pelican song. This song is an epic retelling of Philippe Petit's famous 1974 stroll between the Twin towers, from the inception of the plan to his eventual arrest. The different segments of the song capture both the beauty and art of tightrope walking as well as the determination, hard work, even desperation that went into the performance. van Nagel's vocals get really emphatic and compliment these intense sections very well. ("I! Wage! War! On fate!") Then the section where Petit is out on the wire is quiet, almost like a ballad, with French spoken-word vocals for a bilingual bonus. Overall, an extremely impressive song.
"Confusion of Tongues" is an instrumental that suffers from its lack of amazing vocals and songwriting, but is still some seriously nice progressive metal. It's somewhat more melodic than the average of the album, kind of reminiscent of Scale the Summit in its eccentric, wandering riffs and harmonies. "Junta" is one of the darker songs, about the harsh reign of Guinean dictator Moussa Dadis Camara. It starts off almost like doom metal with a slower, militaristic rhythm before fading into another quieter bridge with spoken vocals over a radio in an unknown language conveying a dense of conflict and desperation. Again, cool lyrics that are pretty consistently complemented by the vocals, e.g. everything going crazy on "Fire!". Other black metal bands have to make up their obsessively dark lyrics; Cormorant just finds them in the world around us. It's pretty sobering.
"The Purest Land" is about the violent and deadly misadventures of Lope de Aguirre in South America. Along with "Junta" this is the other really dark-sounding song on the album. It's quintessential black metal, with dissonant, bleak-sounding riffing and plenty of blast beats. Likewise, the vocals sound impassioned, violent, and just a bit unhinged.
"A Howling Dust" starts off mellow, similarly to "Funambulist", but where the former was about a bold, showy tightrope walker, this one is about a regretful boy in a dwindling California ghost town who has swept up in a wave of racial violence. Yeah, the lyrics are pretty literal and the vocal delivery is more mournful than defiant. There is one riff that keeps getting played with, often in passing, almost like a running joke, that musically ties the song together. The last two and a half minutes are almost entirely instrumental with constant tremolo guitar picking that fades out until there is nothing but howling dust.
The last track, the twelve-minute epic "Unearthly Dreamings", flows directly out of it, joining the ambient guitars with hauntingly beautiful electronic noise that slowly morphs into human speech through heavy radio noise. This song is about Vladimir Komarov, the first man to die during a space flight. Its loud-soft dynamic is a bit reminiscent of "Funambulist", though it sounds more furious--like a rocket--than staunchly determined. Like a rocket in reentry, this album goes out with a bang.
I love albums you can listen to over and over again and find something new every time. Dwellings is definitely one of those. The amount of songwriting, thought, and detail that went into crafting this album is tremendous and will be supremely worth it if you can work past (or enjoy) the harsh musical elements.
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