DOWSING ANEMONE WITH COPPER TONGUE

After falling in love with 'Choirs of The Eye', the second Kayo Dot album initially came as a bit of a disappointment. I admit the main reason was my ambivalent position towards Toby Driver's vocals. Driver uses his vocals as much for melody as for emotional expression, and while he can touch me right where it hurts, it can also be a total miss. In many cases I swing position on the matter one day to the next, so my rating indicates where I stand on this matter today. Tomorrow I will tell you something else entirely. Confusing yes, but you sure can't say Kayo Dot is boring.

The album starts with the challenging 'Gemini Becoming the Tripod', a composition that is as unsettling as its title, with heavily chromatic heavy guitar arpeggios, an oppressive atmosphere and very confronting vocals that cry and try to pierce through your skull. This track is a strange experience, when played at an ear-shattering volume it's brilliant, at normal gain it can be quite annoying, or should I say disturbing?

After this enormous start, the music quiets down, becoming increasingly free-form and subdued. Coming from the heavy opener, the shift that Kayo Dot made from experimental metal to avant-garde music could be made more apparent.

'Aura On An Asylum Wall' is more rocking and jazzy. Instrumental, apart for a short introduction, if you'd ask me to put this in a box I'd call this nu-jazz, but Kayo Dot isn't the sort of music you would want to put in a box; it would upset too much people when opening it.

'On Limpid Form' is an ambitious 18 minutes long. It starts jazzy, with strong - almost catchy! - vocals that remind me (again) of Jeff Buckley. The track gets gradually heavier, more atonal and chaotic. It works quite well for me but it might be too long and uneventful for other listeners.

If the lengthy 'On Limpid Form' is a serious attack on one's attention span, the challenging 14 minute 'Amaranth' asks another heavy effort from the listener. Maybe too heavy, it's slow, languid and free-form, and not good enough as a closer for this album, even though the section with the vocals is quite blissful.

Despite a somewhat disappointing ending, this is still an excellent and defining album. It's may be too difficult to serve as an introduction to this band so approach with care.