CORMORANT HITS BANDCAMP AND NPR WITH NEW MUSICS

Thanks to Metal Bandcamp and MaxR, I discovered yesterday that Cormorant has made its new album, Dwellings, available for pre-order on Bandcamp (here). This supplements the now-closed exclusive pre-order option that the band offered earlier in the fall through their blog page.

As MaxR reported, you can choose between 7 different packages ranging from the download-only for $7 up to a bundle that includes the CD, a t-shirt, a zip-up hoodie, and the album download for $50 (plus shipping). The CD comes in a 6-panel Digipak, which includes the hand-drawn vertical panorama cover artwork by Alice Duke, full-color on-disk design, and a 12-page booklet containing lyrics and liner notes.The pre-orders will ship on December 7, which is the day after the official album release.

Maybe best of all, for people who are as impatient as I am, if you make a pre-order, you get an immediate download of three tracks from the album. Like MaxR, I went with the shirt+CD option and got me that immediate download in the bargain. The band is also now streaming those three tracks on their Bandcamp page. You can find two of them streaming elsewhere (“Junta” and “The Purest Land”), but as MaxR noted, the third one didn’t seem to be currently available anywhere except at Bandcamp.

That third song is called “The First Man”, and it’s now available for purchase all by itself for $1. A few words about the song, plus the song-stream, follow the jump. But as of this morning, the whole album is now streaming at NPR, whose writer Lars Gotrich had this to say about the record: “Dwellings is, far and away, the best metal record of 2011: an emotionally and musically complex album which wrestles with our desperate and sometimes violent attempts to secure a place in history.”

By the way, speaking of the fantastic Dwellings album cover by Alice Duke, you should check out her on-line portfolio here for more fantastic-ness. Also after the jump: the full vertical piece of artwork, of which the cover is only a part.

“The First Man” begins with a trumpet-knell of guitar chords, erupts in a caustic burst of black-metal riffing, shifts to a thunder-roll of synapse-firing rhythms, slows into a proggy section with prominent bass picking and a spiraling clean guitar solo, then begins to roll again with slicing tremolo-fueled mayhem, interjected with more head-spinning solo guitar work. It’s mind-bending and body-moving and soul-satisfying, and Arthur von Nagel’s bestial vocals give the whole thing a charged air of menace.

Having heard all three of the Bandcamp songs, I don’t have any doubt that this album as a whole will be a fitting successor to Cormorant’s striking debut, Metazoa. And by the way, Metazoa and The Last Tree EP are also available on Cormorant’s Bandcamp page for free or at a price you pick. Here’s “The First Man” (you can get it by itself, and see the lyrics, via this link):

Now, here’s the full piece of artwork created by Alice Duke for Dwellings. I’m going to gaze at this as I listen to the NPR album stream. Not a bad way to start the post-Thanksgiving week.