And there you are flicking back through the year, making a list, checking it twice, who did stand out in 2024? And you realise there are some albums you just never got around to writing anything more than maybe a first taste piece or sharing a track and the release news, probably because the band, the label or their people weren’t on the case and maybe because we were overrun here and the distraction of throwing paint and pigeons and the mostly thankless task of writing about other people’s visual art and making that the priority while the music mounts up and well… Catching up before the year ends, the list that is indeed being made is posted and it all almost certainly starts again. The 2025 releases are already piling up in the inbox and waiting until we clear out and catch up with this year. Here’s another three albums that should have been covered already…
Toby Driver – Raven, I Know That You Can Give Me Anything – Toby Driver does somehow after all this time and all his KayoDot albums as well as the many other rewarding musical projects he pilots with such accomplished ambition, he somehow always manages, without ever not being Toby Driver, he manages to go to new places. We were expecting something rather beautiful, something quietly dramatically inward-looking, something warm, something rather dramatically beautiful, we didn’t quite know what to expect though. Well no, we kind of expected it to ope nas it does, we weren’t expecting the warm beauty of Who Missed Me and the almost upbeatness of the running to the ocean of it all, it isn’t quite what I Want from Toby Driver and it isn’t typical of the the album but then again it really is what we want, and there is that avalanche coming. The tone right across the album is beautiful, it is of course drenched in melancholy, in dark colour, in introspective mourning from the corner across from the cemetery, that mix of baroque gothic slow movement that hints at the prog rock and ambitiously painterly widescreen metal flavoured drama of his bands. The tittle track is slow moving warmth, beautiful slow moving epicness, the whole album is slow moving gothic (not goth rock) drama, it is all ravens slowly soaring and musical passages that are in no rush to get where they going (they are, thankfully, always going somewhere, no standing still here, not quite). poetic, timeless, this is a beautiful album.
Toby Driver is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, songwriter, producer, label owner, and (visual) artist, best known for his work as the leader of the experimental bands Kayo Dot and Maudlin of the Well, his solo works and his collaborations with others are equally rewarding. Raven is a dark moody inward looking album and at the same time that is the last thing that it is, everything Toby Driver does is on the unconventional side, the properly progressive side, real art rather the obeying of formula and the musical blueprints of others, his distinctive musical DNA runs through everything he does and once again it does here, this is a warm album, a beautiful album, a recommended album.
Selected previous Toby Driver coverage.
Moin – You Never End (AD 93) – There are moments on this, Moin’s third album, that really hit the spot, moments like the jagged edges that herald Anything But Sopo, the way that particular piece loops back on you and pulls you in, like the warm colour and gentle repetition of C’mon Dive, that track is something really engaging (although did they forget about the ending?). Moin (Valentina Magaletti, Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews) have invited a whole stew of collaborations, the result is something far less obvious, although that might just be result of a growing creative belief in terms of the core threesome? The different colours added by the various guest vocalists writing and interpreting the trio’s world and adding their own embellishment. There’s a restrained vibe, it does feel like a shift, the new phase they talk of. Vocal collaborations across the album from Olan Monk, James K, Coby Sey and Sophia Al-Maria, it feels mellow, it feels deeper, enigmatic, a little more sensitive, a lot less obvious and yes, a weirdly comforting melancholy, lucid. Some of it feels simpler, less is more maybe? You Never End is a very modern, very now, rather forward looking album, an album alive with the possibilities of what might come next. Does it need a little more dimension though? Does it crave a couple more gear shifts? Is it all a little stuck on the same level? The same textures whatever the various voices may add? Is it more enjoyable when you just dip in and out of it? The individual pieces on You Never End certainly are rather fine, they sound damn good on playlists.
Brama – Brama – (Airfono) – On Onte Anar the third of eight rather impressive tracks on this self-titled album by the band from Clermont Ferrand in France, Brama sound like something somewhere near the more experimental side of mid period Custard Pie flavoured Led Zeppelin, well nothing like that really but it is in there in amongst Brama’s forward looking mix of 70s flavoured whatever it? The band talk of “a ceremony at the crossroads of a tarantella and a psychedelic rock’n’roll mass. The hurdy-gurdy as a liturgical organ, the guitar/bass as an exorcised subject and the shamanic voice, mistress of worship” and it probably isn’t a Led Zeppelin influence as much as the same exotic sources as a shared set of influences by both Led Zep and Brama. Of course Brama do it in a very very French way, a far less bombastic way and with “a desire to emancipate themselves from the canons of global rock” and that is exactly how it sounds with that hurdy-gurdy and those rhythms and the “other” time-signatures. The band talk of being “nourished and passionate about pop-ular cultures of the world and that their music draws as much from the violin music of the central massif, as from Pakistani Qawali, the guitar of Mali, German krautrock and the ritualistic rock riff full of fuzz”. At times sunny, at times hypnotic, at times just gorgeously hypnotically sunny, at times really progressive in the best sense, a treat of an album that really does invite you dans une cérémonie…
and, in case you don’t know KayoDot, some live footage from this year and these pieces of colour, fine lots more of Toby Driver’s Bandcamp page…
THE ORGAN 