KAYO DOT
BLUE LAMBENCY
DOWNWARD
(HYDRA HEAD)
A man with a defiantly unique and increasingly impenetrable
muse, Toby Driver returns with Kayo Dot album number three. Blue Lambency Downward’s ten-minute
title track makes the intention less than clear right from the start with a
mordant shuffle, somewhere between spare modal jazz and Gregorian chant, in which
even the most tangible structures are made of smoke. The first ‘solid’ moment
arrives during ‘Clelia Walking’: a brief eruption of Crimson-esque battery
surrounded by sombre strings and weightless bassoons.
There’s very little precedent for Kayo Dot. They have the
air, and very occasionally the aesthetic, of a left-field experimental metal
band (whatever you take that to mean). However, your angle of listening may
suggest jazz (wine bar or free), prog, contemporary classical or even ambient.
It’s mostly about constantly shifting planes of space through which beautiful,
discordant elements meander, sometimes converging in violent catharsis – see
the ‘Awkard Wind Wheel’s focused technical abstraction and terrifying clarity
of vision.
Although Driver’s wafting vocal has been lazily compared to
Jeff Buckley, the closest thing you’ll find, in feel and tone, if not in genre,
is Buckley Senior, Tim – particularly the albums Starsailor and Lorca.
They too have an approach to rhythm, melody and songwriting that’s fluid,
near-shapeless. The genius of both Tim and Toby is their ability to shape this
ephemeral, elusive aesthetic into compelling compositions. Even more
bewildering, complex and vague than its predecessors, which is really saying
something, Blue Lambency Downward is
exactly the kind of album that will bewitch or repel.
KAYO DOT
COYOTE
(HYDRA HEAD)
Some
bands really do defy easy encapsulation. Kayo Dot make music of a perpetually shifting
kind, a writhing, transfiguring sound that possesses elements of prog and jazz
and avant-garde composition and art-rock, but inhabits none of them and all of
them at once. Their fourth album, Coyote,
is a single five-part composition, the lyrics and narrative arc of which were
written by artist and close friend Yuko Sueta in the final stages of terminal
breast cancer. Given that, lines such as ‘Help me, I’m disappearing’, delivered
via Toby Driver’s brittle howl, carry a night-unbearable weight.
Though
micro-composed to the point of OCD, Coyote
is remarkable not only for its complexity, but for its breathtaking fluidity,
the way the wildly disparate moods and methods metamorphose into each other
imperceptibly. KD’s former metal leanings have been utterly expunged these
days, but it’s notable that they’re just as forceful without them. A greater
emphasis on brass adds gravitas and shimmer to the jazzier passages, at times
redolent of ’70s Miles, which at any second may flow into doomy, neo-gothic
ambience, bursts of kaleidoscopic prog that blossom like fireworks, or an
agonising trawl through clattering shaped chaos. More powerful, both sonically and
emotionally, than its wonderful but nebulous predecessor, Blue Lambency Downward, this is a unique, draining experience, as
immersive as it is ineffable.
KAYO DOT – STEREO,
GLASGOW
With half their
number detained by customs and stranded in France, Kayo Dot are struggling
against adversity tonight. Unable to perform a full-band set, the stripped-down
lineup of Terran Olson on keyboard and clarinet, Mia Matsumiya on
violin and Toby Driver on guitar opt to perform selections from the Tartar Lamb
side project. Even more so than KD, this is highly abstract stuff – very
gentle, dauntingly subtle but highly complex. Those only half paying attention
could feasibly believe that it’s mere improvised wafting, but every single
moment is clearly painstakingly pre-planned. Notes wrestle for the right to
emerge from nothingness, or pass through each other, intangible. It’s music
placed halfway between nirvanic contentment and the chalky ravings of a
calculus professor. After
the previous bands’ sensory assaults, KD could be seen as an anticlimax in
terms of energy, yet their stillness makes them all the more compelling.
(all reviews originally published in Rock-a-Rolla magazine)
