Arthur von Nagel, bassist/vocalist and lyricist for San Francisco progressive extreme metallers CORMORANT, recently took time out of the band’s busy schedule to shed some light on Metazoa’s beautifully rendered, deeply complex lyrics and intriguing concepts.
He comments, "The themes of Metazoa came together by accident. It was never a concept album, as the lyrics were written over the course of several years, while I was going through a lot of different mind states. I wrote the words to “Hole in the Sea” while under sleep-deprivation, on a plane heading home to San Francisco from Europe. I was watching the sun rise over the Atlantic. That morning view, coupled with my day and a half of sleeplessness, contributed to the song’s psychedelic mood and abstract, mythic imagery. “The Emigrant’s Wake” came to me after a trip to Stinson, a beach I loved as a kid. When I was there with grade-school friends we’d concoct pirate treasure hunts and medieval jousts in the dunes, create massive sand sculptures… and we always felt this playful fear of the ocean, dipping our feet in the water just so, then running away as the waves chased us to shore. When I visited Stinson again as an adult, the adventures I imagined then seemed so insignificant, the mystery gone, and I experienced this horrible “Calvin-realizing-Hobbes-isn’t-real” moment. I feel the struggle to preserve that youthful magic and innocence against the adult realities of suffering, hatred and poverty is the tension that glues all the lyrics in Metazoa together. This friction is most real for me in “Hanging Gardens,” which is set up as a children’s fairy tale on a floating island paradise in the sky, but the lyrics really originate from an aborted suicide note my father had written, and I had the displeasure of reading. As the story progresses, more and more of the original inspiration seeps into the words and music, until the song dissolves in a bleak sludge of chromatic dissonance, punctuated by what our producer described as the “rat’s asshole” guitar tone. So I’m often mining this oscillation between the childlike and the nightmarish... a Kafka meets The Little Prince vibe.”
CORMORANT’s debut full-length, Metazoa, was recorded and produced by Billy Anderson (NEUROSIS, MELVINS, SLEEP, PRIMORDIAL) at Sharkbite Studios and mastered by Justin Weis (HAMMERS OF MISFORTUNE, LUDICRA, SLOUGH FEG) at Trakworx Studios, and is available for pre-order here: http://cormorantmusic.blogspot.com/
Check out the rest of Arthur’s analysis below:
"There’s another side to the lyrics, when I’m exploring historical or social issues. We are not a political band. However, I am a political person. I’m not here to preach, so I leave my thoughts veiled, but the lyrics are rife with social and philosophical commentary if the listener is so inclined. The story always comes before the message though. I feel it’s essential each song follows a strong, cohesive narrative first and foremost, and then my own beliefs on the subject can be inferred later. Some examples of these more story-driven songs include “Blood on the Cornfields” about the Nat Turner slave rebellion, and “Uneasy Lies the Head” about the Reign of Terror brought down on France by Robespierre following the Revolution, during which nearly 40000 executions were carried out. In the Iron Maiden tradition, I’m a massive history nerd, so I’ll often conduct several weeks of research before adapting any real life events to lyric form. And then of course the lyrics themselves go through dozens of tweaks and rewrites. A strong marriage between the words and music is essential to me, so there are always modifications made when combining the two, and we don’t have any hard and fast rule regarding which is written first. For “Hanging Gardens,” the lyrics had been set in stone for several years. When we arranged the music, we built it very precisely around the words, so that each riff and movement translated the events and moods expressed in the poem. That style of writing accounts for the song’s linear structure, since neither the words nor music contain refrains of any sort. The words to “Salt of the Earth,” in contrast, were written after the music, so I took inspiration from the “color” of the riffing. I function very visually, so I like to close my eyes while listening, and let my mind paint a picture. For “Salt” I imagined a lot of greens, browns and reds, fields blown back by the wind, the travels of poppies and dandelion seeds… and then I built a story around those images. The lyrics to “Sky Burial” were also written after the music, but this was a unique case because the song’s structure called for several minutes of ambiance right in the middle of the piece. So for a change I wasn’t matching the words to any particular riffing, but adding my voice to a landscape of free-form acoustic instrumentation. This near-silence struck me as meditative, which eventually led me to a study of Buddhist myth and ritual. From this research I discovered the Tibetan funerary practice of jhator, which we call “sky burial” in the West. In this rite, specialized monks are assigned the task of rendering the body of the deceased into a pulp, which is then exposed to the vultures on a mountaintop. It is considered an act of generosity to nature, an offering to the living. I felt that was very inspiring, and a fitting rebuttal to the Werner Herzog-esque depiction of nature as an all-consuming, thoughtless chaos I’d imagined in the first track, “Scavengers Feast.”
"So while Metazoa was never conceived as a concept album, there are thematic threads that run through all the songs. What jumped out to us as we were contemplating album titles was something completely unintentional: every single lyric contains an animal. And these creatures aren’t just background imagery, but active participants in the song’s narrative. In “The Crossing,” the story of a poor manual worker crossing the border in hope of sending money to his family back home, the battered, fearful dog foreshadows the protagonist’s future, scrounging in the dust for scraps to survive, while the proud desert wolves of the past have all fallen to extinction. The cosmic she-whale in “Hole in the Sea” instigates the creation of a new world after destroying ours. The ever-hungry hornets, flies, buzzards, and jackals in “Scavengers Feast” speak of nature’s complete disregard of man’s higher ethical and philosophical constructs. So we felt it important to represent these so-called “lesser-creatures” in the album’s name. “Metazoa” is an antiquated zoological term that categorizes all the world’s multi-cellular animals (as opposed to the single-celled “protozoa”). This of course includes human beings. We felt the title successfully enveloped the wide scope of lyrical subjects and musical styles employed on the album, while capturing that sense of mystery and discovery I loved as a child.”
Check out more of Arthur’s thoughts in his Metal Sucks interview: http://www.metalsucks.net/2009/08/28/arthur-von-nagel-of-cormorant-the-official-metalsucks-interview/
WHAT THE PRESS IS SAYING ABOUT ‘METAZOA’
Cormorant hits their stride when they open things up and let the jams out. “Salt of the Earth,” “Hanging Gardens” and “The Emigrants Wake” all meander into totally unpretentious Opeth territory, culling from the various nooks and crannies of dark and folk metal. No surprise here – these moments are worth savoring. As far as debuts go, Metazoa is one of the year’s most striking and free-form. – Blistering 8.5/10
“"This album inspires so much admiration and respect that there’s enough here to silence any critic (myself included). Cormorant is more than your generic metal band following other icons. Cormorant is a group on the path to becoming iconic in its own right.” – Metal France 5/5
The songwriting here is superb. Riffs are plentiful and unique. With the release of this album, the band is certainly living up to their potential. – Sputnik Music 9.5/10
What you see here is not only a mature band who has learned how to create beautiful music but a mature band that I can see as only maturing even more and pushing their sound to a limit unknown to man. Buy this gem now, believe me, it is not something you are going to want to miss -- this is a historical band in the making! – Rate Your Music
Each of their songs has something special to it; there is something for everyone in there, acoustic melodies, brutal riffs, uplifting hooks, gravel bellied vocals and more. Cormorant's style is one that is sure to get heads nodding in unison to their unique brand of metal fusion. – UK Metal Underground
*EPKS AND REVIEW COPIES OF METAZOA ARE AVAILABLE! Cormorant are now available for interviews as well - get in touch!*
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