Kayo Dot - Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue
Robotic Empire
Avant-garde/Progressive
5 songs (61 Mins)
Release year: 2006
Kayo Dot, Robotic Empire
Reviewed by Dee
Album of the year

Finally, an album I can compare with my all-time favourite.

Kayo Dot are a million-piece band based in Massachusetts featuring members from the band that came before, Maudlin of the Well. That band played a curious, relaxed fusion of styles such as atmospheric death metal, post-rock, jazz and yes, even doom. Kayo Dot continue this tradition and if anything have become more mellow still.

The album cover is simple but warm, and its iconic value - the centre portion being clearly recognizable from afar as a symbolic representation of the music within - was the first similarity I observed between "Dowsing Anenome with Copper Tongue" and King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic," a discovery which has prompted me to regularly play the two albums in an alternating fashion for the last few months. Both are a rich and rewarding listen by themselves, and each seems to compliment the other.

The music contained within is most demanding of the listener; all five songs in evidence have the semblance of being in free-time (an assumption dispelled by closer examination) and each suspends its victim in a delicate web through restraint and by the way that every note on the album seems to be greatly sustained, an effect heightened by the tasteful drumming; at no point does Tom Malone, the percussionist, enter a pattern which could be considered traditional; rather, he chooses to gently nudge the songs along with apt bass beats and crashes, preferring to influence rather than overpower.

Other facets of the music can indeed overwhelm, however; take the first song, "Gemini Becoming the Tripod", a dark, ill-intended piece which features Toby Driver's unhinged howls and cries - not harsh, but certainly torturous - along with yammering violins and a series of chords which hang together in a most unsettling way. By the way the tension increases over its eleven minute body, you could be forgiven for mistaking the entire song for an introduction, and if so you'd be most puzzled by its conclusion and subsequent replacement with a heartbreakingly gentle song. This is a sequence startingly similar to the opening two cuts from "Larks' Tongues in Aspic", where the cycling title track fades into "Book of Saturday", a short, bluesy and melodic song - which would still seem devastatingly heavy and brash compared to "Immortelle and Paper Caravelle."

Not quite halfway through, we reach "Aura on an Asylum Wall", the album's most rocking piece and one I'd be tempted to compare to another Crimson song if only the band weren't so damned laconic. The song is at times driven primarily by piano and drums and pinned down by intermittent trumpet stabs, while at others is can be strongly reminiscent of the Italian symphonic prog/jazz rock style, and indeed features the only woodwind present on the album. This strange song concludes with a short outburst of crusty, punky, bassy noise and yelling.

The real treat is still to come. "..on Limpid Form" appears to be a partner piece to "Gemini Becoming the Tripod", and indeed if you consider that song to be all intro then here is the song it really leads to, along with its companion piece - a fourteen minute nightmare outroduction (comparable with the ending of "Larks' Tongues in Aspic part two") which is physically forceful and very heavy indeed; us extreme drone and doom metal fans will be at home with this masterpiece; it's my pick for best song on the album (and this could be premature, but also my pick for song of the year. Don't tell anyone just yet.).

Once they've done submerging you under wave after wave of terror, you are dredged up suddenly and dropped off in the lazy meadow that is "Amaranth the Peddler", a piece that is not so much a song as a melodic sound collage, once which makes a certain band's improvisations sound frenetic and aggressive. Clouds pass by overhead between phrases. The piece is still noticeably ominous, though - it's as if Kayo Dot are trying to give their listeners the bends.

I find the comparison between these two great works most apt; each has a similar song make-up, a mutual mastery of light and shade, a liberal helping of dissonance, violin as a main component and huge swathes of songspace with no singing whatsoever. Additionally, both are of an unrelentingly dark mood, and also the main vocalist from each band sings in a flawed manner; Wetton with his endearing lisp, Driver with his utter refusal to be melodic for most of the album.

This represents an hour's music, a fact which will be used against them by the fans of traditional, rocking metal who don't have the patience for such a fragile release. Ignore them; their heads are as dense as their music.

Killing Songs :
Gemini Becoming the Tripod; ..on Limpid Form
Dee quoted 92 / 100
Other albums by Kayo Dot that we have reviewed:
Kayo Dot - Blue Lambency Downward reviewed by James and quoted 89 / 100
6 readers voted
Average:
 84
You did not vote yet.
Vote now

There are 14 replies to this review. Last one on Fri Sep 08, 2006 8:40 pm
View and Post comments