Review Summary: Fascinating and frustrating at the same time.
The 20th anniversary of
Choirs of the Eye was celebrated through a string of special concerts, where Toby Driver brought back the original members on stage to play the album in full, as well as various songs off their
Moss Grew… LP, which already saw them contributing to various parts. Nevertheless, the latter felt like a successor to
Blasphemy alongside nods to previous affairs, rather than a body of work the founding members committed to as a unit. Despite wandering into different sonic territories throughout the past decade, with both excellent and less enticing results, there was always that portion of fans who wished for a return to form. This latest effort,
Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason finally comes closest to those expectations. The avant-garde experimentation is once more on full display here, constantly swinging between improvisation and loose, yet carefully penned structures. The resulting collection of tunes is perhaps even harder to digest than their highly acclaimed debut. Still, there’s an intriguing beauty to these songs, even in their most shrilling ambient moments, such as “Mental Shed” and “Closet Door in the Room Where She Died”. Both focus on rather dark, ethereal, Swans-reminiscing drones, while Toby and, on the latter, Jason Byron proceed to scream their lungs out. The stories they share are often hallucinatory in the horror scenes they depict, creating a tense, Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge-type atmosphere, especially with the vocals thrown in the background. Between these two numbers lies “Oracle by Severed Head”, whose eerie, glacial guitar chords and left field drum patterns offer some respite overall. A melancholic violin takes the lead halfway, presenting more melodic passages, until the bass leads everyone into an uncanny, free-jazz sounding coda. Upon a closer listen, we can observe various mood shifts, similar to the way rays of light manage at times to briefly reach through a dense forest.
“Automatic Writing” follows, the longest piece on the album, at 23 minutes long. Although slowly unfolding its phantasmagoric ambiance, it ultimately loses momentum due to its unnecessary length. Few other elements are interspersed to push the tune forward, not even the spoken word segment towards the end managing to do so. As “Blind Creature of Slime” suddenly kicks in, waking you up from the induced catatonic state its predecessor caused, you are thrown once more into uneasy territory. Its syncopated groove, blend of screams and clean vocals repeat for minutes on end in a mesmerizing manner, with minimal instrumental additions. A fitting end to such a chimeric sonic universe. In a way, it’s fascinating to hear the band take on such abstract concepts again, not conforming to any conventional moments. That would be
Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason’s strength. It only takes
Choirs of the Eye as a starting point, before venturing on different paths of its own. Unfortunately, once the dust settles, it doesn’t possess that many thrills. There is not enough release for the tension it builds, so it ultimately just dissipates. However, this is the closest Kayo Dot got to the original formula, albeit in the hardest digestible way, so hardcore fans should at least dig in immediately.
