Kayo Dot – Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason (Prophecy) – They sound like a different band here whilst as the same time it is most definitely an album that sounds like it was made by no one other than Kayo Dot. A band that have featured many many (many) times over the years on our pages and airwaves, a band who released their eleventh regular studio album back in August of this year as the New York outfit led by the ever committed Toby Driver commemorates the 20th anniversary of their debut album Choirs of the Eye by reuniting the original line-up to make this latest epic piece of work. A massive whole of an album from ever evolving thing that is Kayo Dot (and yes we should have covered it back when it came out, take it up with the label and their PR department, it would have got rather a lot of radio play around the release date is they’d been just the tiny bit interested).
Kayo Dot are always immense, they are always distinctive, always committed to their never compromised art, they were excellent at this year’s ArcTanGent and this new album is as bold a musical statement as they have ever made. This is a massive piece of work from the ever-changing composer and mastermind Toby Driver and his band, a work that marks both a return and a progression from the band’s seminal debut by revisiting the compositional practices that defined it while pushing forward into uncharted territory (as they always do). This cuts as a deep as they always do, we might not of felt it coming but then we never do know quite what might be coming. Once again rejecting those traditional rock structures and the more predictable contours of metal (if indeed they are to be considered a metal band, I suspect Mr Driver like to think of his band as a metal band, can’t say I ever have); Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason shapes something more than just a sound that feels familiar and at the same strangely, both at the same time, an album that the listener might not be sure of first time around until the penny drops that is and you realise it is as brilliant and as challenging to us and to them as anything they have ever released. It Is dialled up, the ritual of it, dialled up into… just dialled up, it is the real thing, utterly transcendental, cathartic and there’s something about Toby Drive himself that kind of can’t help but reach toward the light even though he’s trying to explore the dark, he’s like a plant leaning towards the light, like a plant growing out of cave, this is something that’s beyond wallowing in gothic horror this is something that’s reaching up all the time. The intensity of it all feel crushing at times, the crushing anxiety of now, that trying to break out of the shackles, out of the fear and mayhem of where we all collectively are right now, and as he says himself, this is Toby Drive writing in ways that resist prediction, this is him composing music that does not reveal itself to pattern recognition, to the algorithmic aesthetics. This is once again, a massive Kayo Dot album, then you knew it was going to be, they always are massive and no two are ever the same, they are however, always Kayo Dot.
Previously…
Oh there’s loads of coverage…
THE ORGAN 