vote
6.5
- Band:
Kayo dot - Duration: 01:06:03
- Available since: 01/08/2025
- Label:
-
Prophecy Productions
Streaming not yet available
The kayo dot have accustomed us to the most unthinkable turns, outlining with their music images and thoughts that could easily pass from what is more sweet and ethereal could be fabled, to gruesome follies, emotional labyrinths disorienting and sometimes up to incomprehensible.
The recent years, to tell the truth – at least those followed by that hip of “hubardo” (2013) – seemed more likely to relatively smooth tones, reaching a clear catchness, at least to highlight an experiment not excessively sketched, by handing a less extroverted and exhausting song form the intentions of the Mastermind Toby driver.
With “Moss Grew on the Swords and PlowShares Alike” of 2021, a rapprochement with more full-bodied and stratified metal forms had been noticed, also in the sign of a renewed collaboration with different musicians previously in line-up in the Maudlin of the Well. Avant-Garde Metal formation that first made known the brilliant ingenuity of drivers and whose deeds return intermittently in its subsequent production.
“Every rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason” is configured as a sort of celebration of the twenty years spent from the “Choirs of the Eye” debut as the same kayo dot, bringing together the same line-up as that album and thus going to reconnect with the most metal roots of the band. 'Metal' that in their case remains just a starting frame, because the extravagance, the unsettling touch, the idea out of the sowing, the upheaval of a reassuring score is the specialty of the house.
By presenting the work, declaring to embrace original and experimental musical forms, the kayo dot define this new stylistic update as “Liminal Metal ': this term, this, that in their vision it would evoke unreal worlds, where space and time stretch and the boundaries between reality and fantasy erod, until they disappear.
Beyond the terms used and philosophical content behind its composition, “Every rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason” undoubtedly falls among the most difficult and abstract chapters of a discography that, in its entirety, of linear has very little. Imagine this last station on their trip.
It is difficult, in fact, to believe that they can be consistently after the other in the tracklist compositions such as the “Mental Shed” and “Oracle by Severed Head” Open. The first is a kind of warning, a threat such as those of Michael runs during his concerts: we start with straziating sounds repeated indefinitely and we see who manages to support them. Between sharp and obsessive synthesizers, restless and very little comfortable vocalizations, waste and an almost non -existent rhythmic structure, “Mental Shed” reaps victims, without giving us who knows what momentum, if not disturbing and shaking. Of a completely different pasta “Oracle by Severed Head”, devoted to sinuous melody, graceful in his interventions of Viola and Violini, plaster of jazz and enchanting made by the flexible driver voice.
The very extensive, alienating and minimal “Automatic Writing” is what gives the most sense of this unbridled experimental will of the band: a succession of a few, very acute notes of synthesizers, isolated percussive rins, almost monastic, and the vocality of drivers that focuses in turn on high and extravagant lines, in a spirited declamation alternating flashes and moments of madness and moments. suffused. Those who are accustomed to the full -bodied material of the group will not be surprised, obviously, yet the feeling is to want to go even beyond themselves and the idea that a listener may have kayo dot.
The final judgment, we admit it, is not simple, even more than other occasions: if the avant -garde and unconventional spirit of the collective remains something worthy and makes the experience overall something difficult to find elsewhere, other aspects raise some doubts.
In some situations, such as the already mentioned “Mental Shed” Open (but also “Closet Door in the Room Where She DaDed” does not joke), wanting to challenge the listener, submitting it to delays and screeching of arduous endurance, seems to be a game too twisted and without true satisfaction for the listener. Even this long format propensity for the individual tracks does not always seem the most suitable, wating several good ideas.
On another front, however, it is always a pleasure to observe as very fine melodies and structures/non-stures like those of the best traces (“Oracle by Severed Head”, the most bold “Blind Creature of Slime”), combined with the fascinating voice of driver, offer fresh and eclectic vibrations like few others.
Here, “Every rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason” is probably, in its entirety, something 'too much' also for the kayo dot themselves. While its individual extracts and ideas shine with their own light and justify the effort of listening to it to the end.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
