Kayo Dot - Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue

Robotic Empire

These days a reviewer can’t throw a dart without hitting a record described as, or which describes itself as, genre-bending. Yet few recordings actually exemplify that quality as well as Kayo Dot’s sophomore release, their first for Robotic Empire. The Boston-based collective was spawned several years ago from the progressive metal unit Maudlin of the Well and came out of nowhere with their excellent debut on Tzadik. Fronted by the multi-faceted Toby Driver (the former Yusef Lateef student who’s got a lovely solo release on Tzadik too, also featuring many of his Kayo Dot bandmates), this group specializes in long-form compositions which visit a baffling number of places without losing consistency or vision. In the past the collective has included a vast number of players and a dizzying assortment of instruments. Currently the lineup includes Driver (who composes, sings, and plays guitar, cello, bells, contrabass, and keyboards), Mia Matsumiya (violin and viola), Greg Massi (guitar and voice), Ryan McGuire (bass and keyboards), Forbes Graham (trumpet, euphonium, and guitar), John Carchia (guitar), and Tom Malone (drums). At the heart of the music is Driver’s beautiful voice, able to growl furiously with the best death metal grunters, explore obsessive monologues like Nick Cave, or float ethereally like the late Jeff Buckley.

The music unfolds at epic length, sounding like mysterious travelogues where the inner travails of some crazed bard are mirrored in elaborate routes through unfamiliar territory. As quirky as the music can be, though – and it is, punishing you one moment with a Neurosis stomp and bathing you in Godspeed-y lushness the next – it manages to be consistent and focused, revealing a bit of itself at a time until its complex personality seems wholly of a piece. The pacing is unpredictable, as the songs can grow in fits and starts, climaxing in unexpected places, breaking down elsewhere just when most bands would follow conventional pathways and resolutions. Some pieces abide languorously in reflective pools, as on the furtive “Immortelle and Paper Caravelle.” Others, like “Gemini Becoming the Tripod,” expand with crushing noise. And some, like “Aura on an Asylum Wall,” even flirt with conventional song form (with an insistent but grooving pulse track providing a catalyst for a fine trumpet improvisation), before diving headfirst into a Crimson-like hyper-lick. But for all the emotional range here, the record’s centerpiece seems to be the dark, pounding “ . . . On Limpid Form,” where the music’s bleak and stubborn repetitiveness, the feedback eye of its storm, could almost be kin to Khanate. Dour, enveloping, but brimming with colorful jewels, Kayo Dot’s music is a treasure.