Cormorant – Metazoa – CD – Saturnine Media
These San Francisco cats gather up a metric shit-ton of metal influences and styles and squeeeeeze ‘em all together in one, big ole, metalli-whatever. And honestly, it doesn’t suck or get all bogged down in itself.
First off they have a cornerstone sound that is all black metal (think a little along the Enslaved lines). They also have some 2009-ish death metal sprinklings in there (a la Amon Amarth), moments of acoustical, Euro-folk metal (a bit Agalloch-y), some good ol’ power metal swaggering and a decent-sized dollop of prog metal time changes (impressive and tight musicianship without the “I went to Berkeley and can play Flight Of The Bumblebee backwards with my penis” pretension). Hell. It wouldn’t shock me if they probably have a whole mess more styles and sub-genres incorporated into their sound that I just have no idea about because of my limited metal knowledge or my lack of hair).
And hey. If you gots a slew of different blends of styles all working together, you really can’t have just one vocal sound, correct? Cormorant understands this as well. Throat dude uses his larynx to go from death-y gurgling goonings to actual singing to screamin’ demon black metal wails to “I’m so creepy and scary” whisperings (that don’t come off as totally corny, might I add) to moments where he actually kinda sounds like Tom Waites (the tune Hole The Sea).
Now…all those ingredients together would normally put a disc like this so over the top that it would completely suck nards. But these guys pull it off and do it fairly impressively. Not one of the styles dominates over the others allowing for the tunes to work well and offer up some diversity at the same time (Shit. The song Hanging Gardens has strings in it[!], a whole truck full of wah-wah and is clockin’ in at about 11 minutes long. And it is still pretty metal.).
When the same-old-same-old gets,…well, “same” and um, “old”, bands love to meld some favorite/popular musical styles and make something “new”. And that many times leads to an ugly, unlistenable, cluster-fuck of “awful”. These guys don’t fall into that realm.