I knew what to expect when Blue Lambency Downward turned up - or so I thought. A new album on Hydra Head? Well, that’ll be some big loud post-metal thing right there, sprawling riff epics at a stately pace, right? Wrong – Kayo Dot are not like that at all.
What Kayo Dot actually are is a question that an enthusiastic taxonomist of music could debate for hours. At the moment I’m putting my money on the newly-created square marked “progressive psychedelic soundtrack-death-jazz”, which is the only thing I could come up with that sounds as simultaneously fascinating and contradictory as Blue Lambency Downward.
I’m not even sure if I actually like it, but it’s definitely fascinating listening; Blue Lambency Downward is the sort of album that you’re always going to find something new in, no matter how many times you listen to it. All the more impressive when you take into account that Kayo Dot is just two people: composer/frontman Toby Driver, and Mia Matsumiya on strings, vocals and other stuff.
Oh yeah, other stuff. Kayo Dot are all about the other stuff. Every song on Blue Lambency Downward (if “song” isn’t too weak a word) is packed out with sounds both familiar and alarmingly alien, weaving in and out of each other like something out of a fever dream. “Clelia Walking” is the most approachable track, at least at first, deploying as it does some sharp fragments of the guitar driven post-metal form in its early stages, scattered sparely between emotive instrumental passages.
But overall, Blue Lambency Downward feels like a soundtrack for some hallucinatory sixties art-house film, full of long panning landscape shots intercut with surreal action scenes. From the spooky psychedelic vocals of the opening title track, it’s obvious that you’re being taken on a journey by someone who knows exactly what they want to show you but isn’t willing to show you the map; Kayo Dot’s seemingly formless smorgasbord of sound quickly takes on fleeting forms as your mind tries to project meaning into the spaces and surfaces it provides. Atmosphere and texture is at least as important as melody and structure, if not much more so.
You’ll be serenaded by stalking strings, haunted house oboes and flutes, distant effect-drenched chimes and clangs, guitars and breathy vocals… everything swirling around a central vortex like liquid flowing out through the plug-hole in a sink, drawing you inexorably to a sudden quiet stasis before passing you out again, carried by the torrents to wherever Kayo Dot want to put you next. And it’s a strange place, sometimes scary, veering from wide-eyed innocence to schizoid fury like a David Lynch movie, always with that same brooding sense of something yet to come.
Is Blue Lambency Downward good? It’s superb – but very challenging, and not the sort of thing you’d want to listen too all the time. Kayo Dot aren’t out to make listening easy, and every track is a challenge, a puzzle, a Salvador Dali painting done with sound. So take a long hard look into the abyss… just don’t be surprised when the abyss stares back.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: avant-garde, Blue Lambency Downward, Kayo Dot, post-metal, post-rock, progressive, weird
