The Last Tree

Based on the album title and cover, one might suspect that this is an Agallochian nature-style folk "metal" album. You know the kind I mean. The "deer are my spirit animal and I want to make sweet love to the ephemeral nature of the melancholy tide" flavor stuff, with acoustic guitar and sadguy vocals in tow. However, although this very band would take some influence from that sound in future work, The Last Tree is rooted in turn of the century melodic death metal and little else. When they stick to their plain but passable script, the results range from fair to good, but any diversions from it result in the Cormorant train going right off the rails, with zero casualties spared. It doesn't help that various other factors do little to enhance the overall experience.

The main problem here is the sense of indecision. Basically Cormorant can't decide whether they want to go for pure 'tears streaming down the face' Insomnium melodeath or play a more traditionally riff-driven variation of the style. The result is a strange limbo that neither kicks enough ass to elicit any real excitement nor elicit enough feels to prod my dry eyes to water. It's a fairly unappealing middle ground, and it reduces the band's admirable efforts to a severe degree. At best the band manages to bridge the two styles in song like clear EP highlight "Trojan Horses," which pulverizes with surprisingly thrashy riffs at the onset but settles into a gorgeous October Tide-esque melody around its midsection. Unfortunately, that's the exception and not the rule, and most pieces here are caught in a halfhearted, lukewarm mopemosh.

Four songs pass by in this occasionally appealing state, but things take a turn for the release's grand conclusion, and not for the better. "Ballad of the Beast" is everything I thought it'd be when I saw the nine minute runtime. It pulls out all the faux-epic stops: drawn out guitar passages, emotional female vocal parts, stripped down acoustic interludes, the works. It's their stab at artsy prog death, and likewise it's meandering, directionless shit. Few things bring me to the threshold of 'longing for death' faster than whispered vocals over a simple, repetitive riff, and they employ the strategy twice here. It's like the band filed for songwriting bankruptcy right when their stock was just beginning to rise, and it leaves the listener with a bad taste in his mouth.

Damn it, Cormorant, I wanted to like this little EP, and there was definitely potential here. I heard Dwellings a few times a couple years ago, and though I wasn't quite over the moon for it, it sure was better than this. Even if I looked past the lacking sense of identity and composition skills here, I would take issue with the somewhat flat production quality and mediocre vocals, which feign brutality and vitriolic snarls at times but are ultimately muffled in the mix (or were perhaps performed too quietly to make much of an impact). Ultimately, when a crap song takes up a full third of the running time of your release, in all likelihood its overall quality will be irrevocably harmed. When most of the other two thirds go through one ear and out the other, I'm just about ready to chop your meager sapling down. Coulda been better, but of well. So it goes.