CHOIRS OF THE EYE

I can without much hesitation say that Choirs of the Eye is singel-handedly the most unique album I have and probably ever will. The music is a thing of it's own, blending into a single song genres of music that have only one thing that connects them: the lack of pre-conceived rules, methonds and forms. Even the lyrics have little sense when it comes to metric, rhymes or any other systematized way of writing poetry or lyrics of any kind. The final part of the opening song, called Marathon, show that quite well: Tell me why world, unfathomable and good,/The beauty of everything is infinite and cruel./An airplane, a puppet, an orange, a spoon,/A window, and outside/Stars and the moon..

In fact, it is not simple at all to discribe this album. The music have such angular abrupt and sharp changes that, despite that, can be so emotional, smooth and with such and easy flow that I think that the best mean to describe te music this record is looking at the cover. There, we see the trubled waters of the surface of a river and a bird that has just fallen in that river. As its body is halfway inside the water, with its talons still looking upwards outside the water, the bird is fighting for its life, trying to resurface and escape this troubled moment.

That would be the same as someone listening this music for the first time: being the the middle of a big and uncontrolable whirlpool. However, due to the sheer amount of things happening throught the 56 minutes of the total album length, no matter how many times you have stoped to listen to Choirs of the Eye, the feeling is the same.

At the same time, we have the placidity of the river water below the surface. Not immediately below the surface, because itis also aggitaded by the bird, but deeper still. The deeper you go, the more the water calmly flows. Same thig happens with this album: the more you know its music, better you can understand the peacefulness of it. That is exactly how this album works. It joins distress and peace, destruction and construction.

Choirs of the Eye also proves to be a fundamental crossroad in Toby Driver's musical evolution. This is the album where the extreme heavy metal side of his music that was so vividly present in his Maudlin of the Well years is slowly but surely loosing ground to the jazz side of himself to the point that in late Kayo Dot and Maudlin of the Well albums there is almost no noticeable heavy metal influence at all.

Grade and Final Thoughts

Compared to his previous albums, still with Maudlin of the Well, Bath and Leaving Your Body Map, Choirs is much less of an avant-garde heavy metal album and more a legitimate expander of the musical horizons in rock music.

Even if it was not so, even if Choirs was not so different from everything else, the album's music is good enough by its own right to receive the rating it does in this website and I find it very hard to dissagree.

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