Lista de Bandas Experimental Metal Kayo Dot Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue

Somewhat unexpectedly Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue took a while to grow on me, but once my initial animosity was gone, I was drawn into the strange, surrealist world of Kayo Dot. This is not an easy listen and you’ll have to give a damn lot of time for it to start making sense.

This is a huge transformation from Choirs of the Eye, with the music being much more sparse and minimalistic, often without any obvious structure. Songs morph in strange and unpredictable patterns, it’s very abstract and there’s not much that can be called cohesion. The term “avant-garde” is a much overused statement but for once I wholeheartedly agree with said label. The music here contains elements of drone, ambient, classical, post rock and even some post hardcore/scream thrown in. It’s not a metal album really, there’s no real riffs or real aggression or heaviness, but for an experimental album it’s fantastic.

The opening song Gemini Becoming the Tripod immediately presents the array of styles and influences this band has assimilated. Opening with quiet guitar lines before moving into a swell of bass and violins, the music goes through several rapid changes, appearing random at first but frequent listens revealing a change that is very structured. The climax of the opening song is surprisingly urgent, having more to do with post hardcore and screamo than anything ostensibly metal.

The record continues with the direction Gemini Becoming the Tripod established. Constantly moving, never really staying the same, the album as a whole is very unorganized and incoherent yet it strikes me that this is the only way this album could have been recorded. In a bizarre way that almost defies understanding, the music here actually makes sense to me. Experimentation for the sake of experimentation should never be the sole goal behind any release yet Kayo Dot manage to make it work.

Of course, many people will (and have) called this album pretentious and often criticize the songs for having no direction. I can agree with this, the album very clearly aims to be as weird and “out there” as possibly and the songs certainly seem to have no direction, yet these criticisms can easily be refuted by saying, well, that’s just Kayo Dot. The whole IDEA of Kayo Dot is to be as mind bogglingly abstract as possible, they’re here to be abstract, there’s no point in criticising the band for goals they NEVER set out to achieve in the first place!

Okay, so people who DO get that, please continue reading. There’s a huge amount of variation within this album, and it’s to be expected of course. Each song fluctuated through multiple changes, ranging from ambient and droning sections, to post rock and classical, scream and hardcore inspired sections and the odd section of a more metallic vigour. I usually role my eyes at bands whose sole goal is to see how many genres they can fit into one song, yet Kayo Dot never over-do it with gimmicks (I’m looking at you Pryapisme). Vocally, Toby Driver has quite the talent. Ranging from quietly sung passages that almost sound like crooning to more anguished and tortured shrieking, Toby supplies a lot of vocal variation within the album and his voice is perfect for the music on display which is suitably bleak and dismal.

In terms of atmosphere, this is a very bleak album. Songs (during the harsher sections) have a strong sense of urgency and desperation whilst the quieter, more meandering sections are filled with feelings of apathy and dreariness. It’s essentially nothingness, yet it’s a perfect representation of nothingness. For most people out there that surely must sound boring and uninteresting, of course if you’re going into this album with that mind-set you’ll be bored out of your head. But for people like me who love the dark and dreary stuff, then this album is an absolute must have.