Yo! Have you guys signed up for our new e-mail list yet? If not, you can, and should, do so above. You’ll get occasional updates from the MS Mansion with breaking stories, special features, exclusive premieres, etc., delivered right to your inbox. Don’t worry, we won’t spam you — expect a newsletter-type of situation with updates once a week at most. And don’t forget to friend us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-the-minute on all the latest suckage.

With that shameless plug out of the way, let’s look at some of the things we did this week, shall we?

• Maybe we should rename the site “Sports Suck?” God Forbid’s Doc Coyle taught us about the NBA and Lazarus A.D.’s Jeff Paulick taught us about the NFL.
• We spoke to Matt Halpern from Periphery and Bandhappy and Nick Cohon from Cormorant.
• We were saddened to report that legendary Black Sabbath guitarist has been diagnosed with lymphoma.
• Jason Richardson was saddened to learn that he has been fired from Born of Osiris.
• We considered ten possible candidates to replace Howard Jones in Killswitch Engage.
• We wagered that the new Metallica album is not going to sound like The Black Album despite what the band says.
• We passed judgement on the new Van Halen single and video.
• We got excited that Refused and At the Drive In are reuniting.
• We learned that Virgin Steele are from Long Island.
• We started to look at some Albums That Will Fuck Your Face Off in 2012: new releases from Adimiron, Hypno5e, Ides of Gemini, Pallbearer, Sai Nam, and Samothrace.

Next week we’ll have even more Albums That Will Fuck Your Face Off, interviews, premieres, and, of course, plenty of snark. ‘Til then, brothers and sisters…

-AR

photo by Daryl Darko

Cormorant describes themselves as a “100 percent self-funded labor of love.” Despite success they’ve eschewed labels, sold their own merchandise and taken as much time as needed to record. The San Francisco four-piece recently released Dwellings, which ended up on numerous year-end lists and earned critical praise. Guitarist and founding member Nick Cohon says the band’s success – both as an independent business and a musical group —is based on a combination of hard work and intuition. Cohon works full time as a project manager for a commercial electrical company specializing in solar installations.  But music is his passion, one he tackles with inspiration and business acumen. He talked to MetalSucks about the profits and perils of DIY publishing and falling asleep to death metal.

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Only two Christmas-themed releases this week as we continue to close the book on 2011’s new releases. Next week will be my last article of the year, as we close down for the year on the 16th.

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Surely it’s a sign that a band is doing extremely well if their publicist asks you to wait two weeks to post about their new album because pre-orders through the band’s webstore have come in in overwhelming numbers. It’s hard to believe that an independent band like Cormorant could be in that position all on their own, but then again, no, it’s not really that hard to believe; Cormorant are a great band, people love ‘em, and as you may remember from his all-too-brief stint as a MetalSucks columnist a couple of years back, Cormorant mastermind Arthur von Nagel knows his way around the business side of music.

Now that we’ve waited the requisite two weeks, we can share the news that Dwellings is once again available for pre-order — this time through Cormorant’s Bandcamp page – in a number of configurations that mix and match the CD, a digital download, a t-shirt and a hoodie. All pre-orders come with an instant-grat download of three tracks, two of which have been previously available and a brand new one called “The First Man.” So get on that!

If you’re the “try before you buy” type head over to NPR, where Lars Gotrich has got the album he’s dubbed “the best metal record of 2011″ streaming in full. Look at the Alice Duke-drawn album artwork above as you listen, and consider if you think it’s worth springing for a CD version of Dwellings just so you can hold and admire that beauteous, sprawling masterpiece. Dwellings officially comes out on December 7th.

-VN

Lotsa new music today! Unfortunately neither East of the Wall or Cormorant are playing The Metal Suckfest like two of the bands with new music we featured earlier today, but in a perfect world we’d have both bands playing 2-hour long sets on both days. And so:

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Amidst the frenzy into which the metal blogosphere has erupted over the forthcoming new Cormorant album, it’s easy to forget that this band is still unsigned. Perhaps intentionally so. As you may remember, band mastermind Arthur von Nagel penned a series of columns for MetalSucks about self-releasing, how to conduct your band’s business, and the music industry in general. I’m surprised that Relapse, Prosthetic, Profound Lore or some other label hasn’t swooped in and picked up Cormorant by now… or maybe they’ve attempted to, and Cormorant just aren’t interested.

In any case, Cormorant are doing just fine on their own; “Junta,” the first song to be released from their new album Dwellings (mind-blowing cover artwork here), is now streaming over at NPR. It’s a 9-minute epic about the violent opposition to the 2009 pro-democracy rallies in Guinea, and it has all the musical touchstones you’d expect from Cormorant following their last album Metazoa, upped to the next level; post- and black metal in a progressive framework that’s spacey, expansive, and hypnotizing. Stream it here, and stay for the interview with von Nagel.

Dwellings comes out on December 6th and can now be pre-ordered directly from Cormorant.

-VN

Last night, Cormorant sent out an e-mail to anyone who has ever purchased something from their online merch store or Bandcamp page unveiling the album art for their forthcoming release, Dwellings. And you will notice right away that it’s pretty, uh, unique. It’s too massive to fit on the front page, so please click on the image to make it bigger:

Never mind the fact that I can’t remember ever seeing album art that’s totally vertical like this before; shit gets even more impressive once you actually look at all the detail, and read the band’s description of the work:

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There’s gonna be a presumably-excellent new Cormorant album called Dwellings later this year, and if that news doesn’t make you happy, you must not know Cormorant. And you should remedy that lack of knowledge right quick.

In fact, Cormorant are only too happy to help you remedy that: “for a very limited time,” the band are giving away their last album, Metazoa, for free. And in a variety of high-quality formats, too, including 320kbps mp3s and FLAC files. So, basically, if you don’t already own this album and you don’t take advantage of this offer, you are a numbskull. You literally have nothing to lose, and lots and lots of awesome metal to gain.

So go download that shit right now. Listen to it. Love it. And hopefully we’ll get a release date for Dwellings real soon.

-AR

Thanks to John for the tip!

Pretty much the only good thing to ever come out of having Zilty express his barely-post-adolescent insecurity in our comments section was the discovery of Cormorant; longtime readers will remember that Cormorant bassist/vocalist Arthur von Nagel even ended up doing some guest blogging for us for, like, ten seconds. (You can read his three columns here.)

So I’m happy to tell you that Cormorant have completed work on a new album, Dwellings, and that that album is now scheduled to come out “mid-fall.” Vague and not entirely helpful information, but, hey, it’s a start!

And, unfortunately, that’s really all we know right now. But there is the below, not-terrific-quality video of the band performing the instrumental title track in San Francisco last summer, so that’s nice. Music sounds pretty cool, at least — not that that fact is a huge shock or anything.

And hopefully we’ll have more info soon.

-AR

FEATURING MEMBERS OF INTRONAUT, DARKEST HOUR, THE RED CHORD, KYLESA, GORGOROTH, CORMORANT, RETURN TO EARTH, KRIEG, LAZARUS A.D., HAIL OF BULLETS, AND BLOODHORSE

For 2010, we decided to do something special as part of our regular end-of-year festivities here at MetalSucks — namely, ask musicians from across the vast spectrum of the metalsphere (or, in a few cases, the almost-metalsphere) what their favorite albums of the year were. Death metallers, thrash metallers, black metallers, stoners, grinders, and djenters alike graciously contributed lists to MS, and we’ll be running them in groups of ten to eleven musicians at a time twice a day for the rest of the week.

After the jump, check out the fifth group… we hope you enjoy seeing what some of metal’s heaviest hitters were into this year as much as we have!

(And please note that these are musicians and that they, um, have a lot on their minds. So some of ‘em named albums that actually came out last year. Please don’t freak out.)

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Everyone knows that a band’s first album is always their best and everything thereafter sucks. It is not possible for a band to get better with time, especially if they’ve signed with a record label. Just ask Ziltoid, everyone’s favorite Interhole metal troll.

Ziltoid was all over the nuts of Cormorant just last year and first brought them to our attention when he interviewed Arthur Von Nagel on the day he took over MS. Now, I’m not spiteful (ok sometimes) and I’ll give credit where it’s due; Cormorant are a good band, and Ziltoid definitely made us aware of them. Metazoa was a rockin’ album, fer sure, and I’m quite impressed that it was completely self-funded and entirely DIY.

So now it’s a whole year and three months later — which in Troll Time is like an eternity — and Cormorant have announced that they’ll be entering the studio in early 2011 to record a new album.

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Black metal, in spite of its more purist fans, has undergone so many stylistic permutations since the Norwegian second wave’s arson-fueled media explosion that I’m hard-pressed to even define what black metal sounds like circa 2009. By frankensteining elements of Mayhem, Bathory, Burzum, Darkthrone, Celtic Frost, Emperor, Venom, Enslaved, Ulver and countless other classics with every unrelated style under the wintermoon, bands to follow spawned sub-sub-genres for all tastes: folk-black/Viking metal, symphonic black metal, war metal, suicidal black metal, atmospheric/ambient black metal, blackened post-rock, progressive black metal, black-thrash, blackened death metal, industrial black metal, national social black metal, black/doom, blackened crust, black n’ roll… and a peculiar little anti-style often referred to half-ironically as “post-black metal.”

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So I was working on the proper follow-up to my article “Anatomy of a Record Contract,” which, for all you aspiring bands out there, will be an in-depth guide to self-releasing a metal album.  I was finishing up a section listing effective methods for shipping merchandise, and I wrote a sentence that made me pause and realize how incredibly fortunate I am:

“To aid with packaging orders, your own family is potentially a valuable resource.”

Now family is a delicate subject for some, as it is for me on my father’s side.  But overall in Cormorant, we’ve all been blessed with family members supportive of our music.  While we were holed up for two weeks recording Metazoa, Matt Solis’s father visited us brandishing a mighty cauldron of chicken mole, and his brother Andrew contributed the album’s awesome keyboard tracks.  We’re very grateful for the horrible racket Brennan Kunkel’s poor grandparents were kind enough to endure when we practiced in their living room or garage, and all the beautiful operatic female vocal work on our albums comes courtesy of his sister Deborah Spake.  Nick Cohon’s dad actually tracked the rain stick parts on our song “Ballad of Beast” and did a hell of job of it.  On my end, my aunt Deborah Tibbetts contributed her significant graphic design skills to fashion the look of our EP The Last Tree, and my grandmother, despite being in her 70s (but still spry), comes to rock out at most of our shows.  My girlfriend Amber’s parents Alison and Greg Nelson and brother Ben have backed us for years, and her father not only helped us construct the sound-proof practice studio where we composed Metazoa, but he actually built the bass and one of the primary guitars you hear on the album.

And then there’s my mom.

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Please join us in welcoming our latest musician columnist, Cormorant’s Arthur von Nagel. He’ll be writing for us from time to time and we’re happy to have him on board! Enjoy his inaugural column… and don’t forget that you can stream Cormorant’s new album, Metazoa, right here.

When I was sixteen and stupid (and weren’t we all?), I had this silly idea that when you form a band, the ultimate goal was to get signed.  Once you’re signed, you’ve made it.  Cascades of money gush from the pockets of your fans, you score the covers of Time, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone and Home & Garden, you’re given the master key to the Playboy mansion, and, of course, you get to quit your day job.  Now, not to say this isn’t all 100% true, but since then I’ve been able to witness this mythical beast known as a “record contract,” and she’s quite a bit hairier than I once thought.

She looks like this, minus the unfortunate puritan censorship of her naughty bits [Editor's note: you can click on any of the below images to enlarge them.]:

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Well, at least one good thing came out of that day we let Ziltoid run the site: we ended up exchanging e-mails with Cormorant vocalist/bassist Arthur von Nagel (read Zilty’s excellent interview with Arthur here), who, we’re very pleased to announce, will begin writing a new column for MetalSucks, “Tiberian Vocalizations,” later this week.

To celebrate our blissful new union, we’re streaming Cormorant’s awesome new album, Metazoa, right here for the next two days. Produced by the legendary Billy Anderson (Neurosis, Brutal Truth, High on Fire, Mr. Bungle, etc.), Metazoa integrates elements of prog metal, death metal, black metal and folk metal into one truly unique, totally kick-ass package. Metazoa is Epic with a capital “E” – trust us when we say that you NEED to check out this record. And don’t forget to have a look at the lyrics – like Pig Destroyer and Primordial, they are a large part of the band’s sound and aesthetic and are very much worth your attention.

Metazoa comes out tomorrow via Saturnine Media. You can (and should!) order a copy through Cormorant’s official webstore. And don’t forget to check out Cormorant on MySpace for all the latest news and updates on the band!

Enjoy the album…

[this promotion has ended]

Once the polls indicated that I was practically guaranteed to win this little contest, I decided that one thing that I really wanted for this site was an interview. But I didn’t want an ordinary interview—I wanted a killer interview. Luckily, bassist/vocalist Arthur von Nagel of the band Cormorant was more than happy to provide this interview. In fact, Arthur went way beyond anything I expected!

For starters, Cormorant is a band that is very hard to categorize. Some might be very general and say “extreme progressive metal,” while others might just be up to the task of labeling them using every subgenre that Cormorant integrates into their music (an arduous task if I do say so myself). Regardless, these guys bring an incredibly unique and diverse sound into the metal scene. Based on what I’ve heard so far, their new album Metazoa is definitely looking like it’ll be one of my top albums of the year.

Besides being a great bassist, Arthur is just a genuinely classy guy and quite the intellectual as you’ll see in the interview after the jump.

Read the interview after the jump.

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