I still have to get into this band. Gonna forcibly subject myself to this tomorrow. Duct taping myself to a chair and everything.

Goddamn this is gorgeous

@zaruyache If you've never heard anything by Kayo Dot before, you really need to start with Choirs of the Eye

HYPE

zaruyache check out maudlin of the Well too

*incoherent grumbling*

godly sounds emitting from the hyperspace

holy shit yes, 2016 is looking pretty great so far

Wow this is not what I was expecting but I like it

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Has Toby done it again? Sweet!

damn, they got weird with it. not sure about this one.

"they got weird with it"

they pretty much do that every album

"they got weird with it"

lol

i got jiggy with it !!!

maybe this time I'll get it. 3rd time may be the charm

prob terrible. kayo dot is the most pretentious band on the planet

how are they pretentious

long drawn out songs, stupid song titles, blending too many genres together

its gyro lol

not sure how u can 5 gybe and hate this but ok gyro sure buddy

wow the second song is like 10 mins long. that is way too long. and where's the hook? all songs should be a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus structure

lol yeah i'm just messing with you guys, i've always loved kayo dot. and i know the post you're referring to, i think. the one where he called out pitchfork?

wow this first track is beautiful

at first i was like 'man gyro having gyro opinions again' but then i checked his ratings and now i'm just confused

gyro u should 5 the new autechre

cool, will check.

i'm always amazed that they can continue to change their sound. this sounds almost 80sish to me with those dreamy synths. hopefully the rest is as good

nah, new autechre is a 3.5 imo on the whole. if i could cut it up however i wanted and make my own playlist out of it it would be a 5

nice

this second track is so fucked

the vocal layering is hypnotizing

lol gyro acting like he usually does but this time is joking. the meta is too real for me

i'm sorry!

i was a little upset to find that i didn't like anything nearly as much as the first track. gonna have to listen to it again

Hubardo > this > Coffins

yeah?

Need to listen again. I'm not on the hype train yet. Coffins didn't click with me right away either.

Choirs > this > coffins > coyote > rest of KD discog imo

Choirs > Hubardo > this > Dowsing > Coffins > Coyote > Gamma > BLD

oops sorry

Hubardo>Choirs>The Chronic>Coffins>Dowsing>Stadium Arcadium>Led Zeppelin IV>this>BLD>The Marshall Mathers LP>Goo>Coyote>Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan

Am I doing this right?

Looking forward to hearing this tho. If it's anything like you all are describing it should kick ass.

choirs > blue > hubardo > dowsing

i love seeing rankings for kayo dot. there is no one album that is liked by most, everyone has such diverse opinions. badass.

the only incorrect opinion is that any of their albums is worth skipping

i think there's a consensus that choirs is the best, but yeah rankings are always different which is awesome

favorite band, another stellar release. will be very surprised when/if a KD record comes out that I don't end up loving.

i'm still perplexed by the wave of people who rate hubardo as their best. i feel like a lot of sputnikers hopped on the KD train when that came out and haven't given the rest of their discog enough time. it's good, but easily one of my least favorites

that being said, I adore the direction they're going in with this and Coffins

only thing i've heard from this band is gamma knife and i loved it. maudlin's stuff is really good too, checking this now

'they got weird with it'
lmao

so far this is like if Talk Talk got reeeeeally into 80's synthy electronic junk after Laughing Stock.

you mean BACK into 80s synthy electronic junk, i presume?

blue lambency and coyote are my favs tbh

blue lambency is overlooked. same with coyote but i like lambency more

that said, calonyction girl is one of the best songs ever

lambency is an incredible album yeah

yeah calonyction girl is possibly my fav kayo dot song all together

Even try to claim you don't visualize Sebastian the crab: Rings of Earth @ 1:10

weww everyone couldn't detect the sarcasm.

of course kd are fuckin weird.

Mannn, I've been all about every KD album so far, even while some of them took some time to really connect to at first. But this is the first time that I'm feeling like I actually might not be down with this one. It's a bummer because I feel there's a lot of good material here, some truly great moments, Amalia's Theme is amazing, but certain aesthetic decisions, certain synth sounds or vocal deliveries are kind of blowing it for me. Its also feeling somehow underdeveloped as an album. I don't know you guys, I'm a little sad rn.

dunno if im feeling this either tbh

I really want to like it super bad though. There are so many things I love about it, but they tend to be right around the corner from things I just can't even with. Can't stop listening to it though, and it's definitely stuck in my head... even the spiral out section of All the Pain in All the Wide World.

its definitely like the least engaging kayo dot album ever

I think I know what you mean, but, what do you mean?

its the first kayo dot album ive ever listened to where i forgot it was even playing

its just not very exciting at all and the production makes it really just kind of blend together into one long piece of kind of boring uneventful music

Yea, feel. Its in a way the flattest album maybe, dynamically and emotionally. The most compositionally rectangular. The sections often seem more arrayed in sequence than one developing into the next. It seems to deliberately avoid ever breaking through to the climax you might imagine. There's not as much space where things breathe.

flattest for sure, thats a good word. all of that was appropriate. u should review it.

I kinda like the way the music doesn't really resolve any climactic moments you're expecting, which isn't usually a good thing but for some reason it works for me here. More than anything I just really like the way it sounds, it kinda feels like what the cover looks like.

Some of the melodies in and of themselves are anti-climactic in a similar way, like for example at the end of the opening melody of Amalia's Theme there's notes in the chords that really aren't meant to be there and are never resolved to how you would expect them to sound... if that makes sense

With every KD album, its good to start from the foundation that this is alien music, and then go from there. Throw musical concepts out the window. Human concepts like "climaxes", "chords", "melodies", operate with different rules in the KD realms. Toby would probs hate being compared to a jazz musician, but in a way, his music is like modern-day Sun Ra; he isn't making music for any other reason than to show the world, with audio, the inside of his brain at the time.

yeah but can we talk about music rn though? :p

lolwut

"With every KD album, its good to start from the foundation that this is alien music, and then go from there."

imma make a supposition of, "no, you're talking shit," and go from there instead tbqh.

good cuz ur supposed to do that w opinions you disagree with tbqh

I've always thought BLD was really great in handling climaxes without relying on conventional tricks. I agree with you guys that the bizarro trans-human-comprehension-seeming decision making in KD tends to be admirable and mind expanding, and I always approach this music assuming that every decision was made very specifically and everything is just as it is intentionally. So if there's a flatness about this album I figure that it was probably deliberate.

But yeah, this is the firist time I'm really questioning whether some of the decisions are working as well as they could in the context of what seems to be intended, not even whether they're decisions I necessarily agree with or like. As I'm listening to this one I'm constantly having thoughts of what I would have done differently, and one thing that keeps coming up is that it might really benefit from more dynamic contrast at times. Just to carve something out a little deeper here and there. Or to go in the opposite direction and really disintegrate the whole thing into a blurry slab of information a little more. BLD as you mention downplayed the extreme dynamics, but it was still far more dynamic than PHOBOS. Here the intensity and pacing are fairly constant throughout most of the album, all within kind of a midrange, which could work well to create a dense rainbow-grey slab of complexity, but it doesn't quite get to a level where it feels that way.

Did you guys catch that interview Toby did with Heavy Blog? He has a lot of great and interesting things to say as always and sheds some light on the intentions behind the album. He refers to designing the music as a sort of hypercube, something dense with vertically stacked information, and that seems to be beyond human ability to comprehend or execute. It definitely comes through this way, but I keep imagining ways that angle could have been played up a teensy bit more, just subtly. For me, as it is, it sits somewhere juuuust shifted off center of being either here or there, which could often be true of KD, but here its just enough of a nudge to make me a little confused about whether realizations are aligning with intentions. Again perhaps *that's* intentional. I'm still listening.

Just going to keep blabbing up in here.

Anyone else getting a sense of incompleteness with this album?
Most of the tunes end by cutting off without much or any resolution, which of course is always going to propel us into the next number. Legit. It seems to be setting up something that never happens though, because it happens on every track, and then the finale as well.

I've never thought this about any KD album before but this feels a little bit hodgepodged together, and I'm missing the journey of the overall form.

Amalia's theme is a great opening. Its just great overall imo, as a self-contained experience. There's an arc about it, a climax. It also sets us up to expect a weirdpop/song based album to follow...

Which picks up at the outset of the second number. But then this one leads to that drawn out unravelling section and the expectation of a pop album is annihilated. It feels like a really odd point in the overall record to be doing something like this, where nothing like it ever really happens again. We kind of go back into comprehensible linear music through the duration. The very end of this one ("potential under icy moon/hand in shadow pocket" etc.) is suddenly so classic Kayo Dot anti-songform fiddlestick fuckmagick. It's awesome and hella WTF. We're left hanging on murder conspiracy tension on this one.

Magnetism could be seen as the peak, while what I'd interpret as the "climax", ("who ever wanted to live forever",) could be seen as *maybe* the more obvious climax of the entire album. It seems to be at the same time a catharsis of what's happened hitherto, but also contains a good deal of tension and definitely isn't any sort of resolution. There's still a great deal of tension hanging as it fades out...

Which the first section of Rings of Earth significantly rinses clean. That's cool, put the relief at the beginning of the next piece. But it's not a catharsis, just a momentary distraction from it, and gradually the unease resurfaces.
Rings of Earth has a lot of my favorite moments on the record, and that final section is totally epic. IMO it's probably the real crest of the album. But still it seems to be a premonition of something to come next, like it's the shadow of something enormous looming out of sight. It cuts away, and there's that distorted far-off guitar figure, which seems to imply that we've been removed from the scene, but the apocalypse therein is still going on somewhere, maybe forever.

Its like there's something missing between Rings of Earth and Brittle Urchin to me, or at least that some additional material somewhere could help to unify the record.

Brittle Urchin is obviously a closer. It has the potential to be a great foil to the nonstop density and tension of the rest of the album, but it feels like, as epic as the end of Rings is, we never got *quite* where we need to have been for this to work as a relief. Once the beat kicks in, one might expect it will blossom into some sort of huge catharsis, and instead we have the minimalistic vocal melody slightly modifying and recontextualized before a final abrupt cutoff.
At this point it also feels strange to me that, thematically, we've gone from this retro-futurepresent nightmare world laden with dark commentary on modernity and quotidian urban experience, which opened with a lyrics so narratively specific that, especially considering KD's predilection for concept albums, might seem to be establishing a continuous picture to follow, to, without resolving that, suddenly jump to this very personal ballad.

Eloquently put

I personally find this to be one of KD's best, but I can understand how it would feel unfinished to some

How can people say that this feels unfinished when Coyote, Gamma Knife, and Stained Glass exist. It's just not traditional in any musical way, and there're still dynamics, you just have to listen closely. I found all the songs pretty engaging and worthwhile in their own ways.

Hard for me to place it within the KD discog but I keep coming back to it since I can't quite figure it out. There's a lot of pleasing textures and composition, but I would agree with ggg in that the lack of significant dynamic shifts does give it a bit of a flatter sound - again agree that it is most likely intentional. This to me is why the closer works so well. Finally having the space to breathe after such dense tracks as All the Pain and Rings of Earth is very satisfying, particularly with the focus of the instrumentation shifting to the brittle, clean guitar, at least for the intro.

It's pretty traditional though, at least compared to their best albums, like Gamma Knife, which is glorious

@ggglllooommmppp review it for sure

I'm not so sure it's that much more traditional. I mean the instrumentation is but the compositions are still quite unconventional.

Yeah he just has to take those comments and piece them together into a logical read and there he'll have it.

The lack of dynamics until the final track is probably my biggest complaint as well, but there's enough energy and interesting musical ideas going on to keep me engaged. It's pretty short which also helps.

Yeah agreed. As stated I really enjoy it, but still processing it of course.

TalonsOfFire, I know right? I've always thought every prior KD/TD/motW album was completely brilliant in getting such ~wR0nG~ ideas to work so well, and to make things that in anyone else's hands might come off as unsatisfyingly unresolved, or pasted together, or *WaNKy* come together just perfectly within a singularly rare, intentional vision. And always from a new and unexpected vantage point. It's always been amazing for me.

(Just for the record: While fans tend to have a pet wish as to what direction the band would progress in/return to... I honestly just love to see where they'll go next, and would never go around with my big stupid mouth open about this, but if I were held at needlepoint to give my opinion, I'd say... Wouldn't it be nice to see them take something like In the L..L..Library Loft as a starting point and drive way off the deep end from there? I'm way into the wrongness, baby.)

Gamma Knife is "one of my fave KD albums", (and therefore fave albums,) and actually, the overall form of PHOBOS seems similar to it. Five pieces. The tonally pretty opener. Three denser, darker, uglier mindfux in the middle. The beautiful and melancholic final that creates somewhat of a bookend with the opening track. On Gamma Knife, without getting too deep into it, I thought Lethe as an invocation, which opens a window into this grainy, grey, sawtoothed, absolutely fucked "black metal" realm was so killer. The production really situates the three black metal tracks as a dreamworld that's arisen out of the normal world we're in on Lethe and the title tune. Its like we sail out the window of our bedroom in our world like Peter Pan and enter this long, demented hallucination in a raincloud before finally floating back through the window. Gamma Knife feels like it exists in that dewy moment of recalling the morning's dreams before your eyes have opened. It's a fragmented, wackadoodle record, but the overall design and context that each piece is co-creating adds up to something just as it should be, to my ears. Similarly so in their own ways, BLD and Coyote.

I'm still trying to put a finger on what exactly it is that makes me for the first time feel like some of this stuff isn't working that well, just thinking out loud here and trying to get a grip on my perceptions of it.

Man, am I a pleb for wishing that Gamma Knife had cleaner production?

Yeah, LOL

Nahh, I'd be interested to hear that for sure, and I get why *you people* want that. Its really interesting music and its kind of hard to hear what's actually going on. But I have a feeling I'd like the existing version better in the end. The hazy granularity of those three central trax really enhances the phantasmagory, makes it feel more intangible, everything swirls and bleeds together in grey murk, you think you may have heard something, maybe you didn't, imagination really gets swimming. Its like the final chase scene through the night in the '74 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The heavy film grain, the super dark shots renders it all the more nightmarish in a dreamlike sort of way. What's unclear is an invitation to dream.

Honestly... I would be psyched if future KD albums delved into deliberate experimentation with "shitty" production techniques.
Come to think of it, if the synths on PHOBOS had been recorded on a half-broken reel-to-reel, the tape left outside for a few weeks, then re-amped inside of a chimney, I would probably be 10x more into it.

"For my money tho, I would have to say that Chim-char is probably the best Pokemon"

cool user

Hubardo was cool but I rarely came back to it, thought Coffins was meh
still gotta check this

applying cleaner production to gamma knife would be like applying cleaner production to nattens madrigal

this is like a poor man's Coffins On Io. Like the sci-fi tones on the second track but not amazing tbh

ok.

damn, sucks how polarizing this has ended up being for people, I really enjoyed this

i mean it was not bad at all, just not good either

might need a few more listens to not expecting anything tbh

The problem with Gamma Knife is that the 3 middle tracks were recorded live due to money constraints. The first and last tracks sound fine.

"this is like a poor man's Coffins On Io"

Thats like saying a Bentley is like a poor man's Rolls Royce. cmon

gamma knife has some of my favorite production ever

@jas same, ive jammed it 8 times so far, hasn't lost any of its splendor

Agreed man, love Coyote as well.

huh
this was kind of underwhelming

the soundcloud stream really does not do the production on this justice (for those who pointed out that there was a lack of dynamic shifts and things along these lines) imo. the official album mp3s are immense

Good to know! Did you get a physical copy in the mail already?

Nope, downloaded flac from bandcamp

...Can we talk about the fake credits on this album? These are fake right? Does Dan Means even make an appearance here? Honestly, this album is a huge let down on its own in a lot of ways but the more I think about this fake personnel the sadder it gets. Is it supposed to be a joke? Goddamn it.

Toby Driver - voice, synths, guitar, bass guitar
Keith Abrams - drums
Ron Varod - guitar on “Brittle Urchin”
Daniel Means - saxophone
Sage Riesman - violin
Stacey Winegyn - violin
Bing Minz - violin
Roman Celine - viola
Dabe Wyche - viola
Alexis Travelion - cello
Landen Chelengs - contrabass
Lemuel Bardor - harpsichord
Bree Eng - pipe organ
Duggan Elston - hammond organ
Valentin Dublev - mellotron
Charmane Tressel - glass harmonica
Gloria Hattifer - celesta
Bhin Turmes - trumpet
Ephraim Narata - flugelhorn
George Chamdles - rhodes
Stelvio Nebulli - hand percussion
Guillaume Veltaj - hand percussion
and The Adirondack Twilight Choir

maybe they're fake. maybe not. the sax is in the last song; you can defs hear it, its when the drums and chorus kick in. like i said, you guys cant judge by those soundcloud tracks. they are compressed as shit and don't even let you in on the full sound.

Really happy to hear that re the production...
Ok, yeah, I'll try to keep my tears in my eyeballs until I get the real deal.
Still though, the fact that you're not sure if the roster is fake or not on hearing the flax...
I know a lot of fans got really stoked when that info started circulating a month ago, and in light of the expectation that creates it's hard to imagine many listeners not feeling a little misled.

why that make u sad

even if the roster is a bit fake (which i think is more likely than it being totally bogus), its typical toby shenanigans. make a fake roster with interesting names. i feel like its a move we should expect from him. im in love with the record so i dont think it detracts, if anything it adds some mystery to it.

part of why i loved maudlin of the well so much back in the day and why they bring me such nostalgia now was the sense of mystery and dreamlike treasures in the albums that you couldn't totally make sense of.... there is little secrets in driver's music that make it something special. some may find that pretentious, unneeded, or even detrimental to the music, but to me those albums and methods used to enhance them are very close to my heart.

what interesting names

literally who are these people

I *completely* feel you on everything you're saying in the second bit, and I agree, it's classic Toby shenanigans. (I know for sure there have been times in the past when he's invented names of people that would be right at home on this list... maybe 15 years ago.) I've loved every Toby shenanigan so far.
I'm tending to imagine the plan might have been like...
>Deploy over the top credits
>Fans of the rich symphonic layering on CotE / the majority of fans who just want CotE 2 get pumped
>Album drops and everyone loves it, forgetting their expectations
>Fans realize their expectations are dumb and get over clinging to the desire for CotE 2
Which would have worked for me if the album had been amazing. Idk.

don't be sad friend, i didn't like it either

Been a fan since Psychobells. I deeply admire that they do what they want, and I know, of course, this music isn't being made to satisfy *me* or any particular category of fans necessarily. As an artist I don't believe you're in *any way* indebted to *anyone* to make any particular decision at all.
One project that *I* don't particularly *love*, in nearly 20 years of consistent output, across such a broad range of approaches, is an unbelievable track record. I don't even hate this. There are things I love about it. There are things I cringe about. I respect it a great deal.
Personally, I'm a little bummed to see a pattern tending in many ways in the complete opposite direction of what my dumb little pet preferences would wish for over the last three records. Hubardo's return to more linear writing, bridging the past-present-future was perfect. Coffins on Io was positioned as a more casual one-off pop record. I was a little underwhelmed to hear that initially, but it turned out so great for what it was. Now it seems like they're continuing down that trajectory. But who cares what I think, to a large degree, it doesn't matter. Fans seem to have widely varying preferences as to which side of KD's personality they lean, which is bound to happen considering how eclectic they are. They always do what they want regardless. It's really great.

I just feel like there aren't many artists on the earth today who are capable of what I know Kayo Dot are capable of. We need vigorous visionaries to push music forward, and I sort of feel like KD are on a trajectory of chilling out on ambition.

I'll always be a fan. I'll always listen, and I'm sure I'll always find something to appreciate.

pre disappointed this and the new swans weren't as amazing as they should have been. they both under a 4 avg too smh

probs why i am so on board with this new one is because it sounds like another "world" from the coffins on io universe, and that album blew me away more than hubardo. it has somewhat to do with subconscious association and the vibes on that; one of my favorite movies ever is blade runner (literally has haunted my dreams/life since i first saw it, along with its haunting score) and coffins sounded like my favorite band ever making an album just for me (a blade runner album of sorts). this album (once again, through association) reminds me of some of my favorite animes of the 90s and concentrates that into an epic, lush, crystalline, and technological marvel. i can see how this wouldn't jive with everybody. ggglll, its apparent how much you love kd; i admire your ability to look at this music carefully and verbalize your thoughts with a great deal of depth.

Top thread guys.

Yo, that's awesome!
Yeah Blade Runner is great!
Love Coffins on Io, and I think it hit the nail on the head in creating that world.
Imo PHoBoS is damn cool in concept. When I listen though, I hear so many missed opportunities to have pushed the ideas to an even more impossible level, make the ideas that are so strong on paper communicate more clearly in realization than they do for me, and at times to just be "more interesting". (That thought has never crossed my mind for a second with Kayo Dotz of the past btw.)

Here's an example of what I mean by chilling out on ambition, and also, a perfect illustration of my overall conflicted feels with the album. It's pretty much all there on All the Pain in All the Wide World:
Right from the outset of the track, I'm all about this soundworld. It's one I'm super familiar with and that's personally totally nostalgic. Its practically straight out of a premium-era Cure record. They're one of my favorite bands of all time. So far it's progressing in a pretty straightforward way. It's a dark, aquarian post-punk *song*. Amalia's theme had been a fairly straightforward song by KD standards as well. This is the longest track on the record. Will this continue to develop in a similar way, or will they run it somewhere fucked up? Can't wait to see where it goes. The specifics of the writing in this first section feel a little bit unspecific. There's nothing at all happening here that hasn't been done to excellence by other bands over 30 years ago, nor would it have been one of the standout tracks on Disintegration but it *sounds good*. That heavy wash of synth rain that sets in midway. Soooo beautiful. It's nice. Then the atmosphere starts to shift, setting up that little classic Genesis bit, "No one listens can't you hear me I'm talking". Initial reaction - these lyrics are awfully pedestrian and cliche for KD... what is this really about? Knowing KD it couldn't just be what it seems on the surface. I cringe, looking for understanding. Something about this section seems just slightly off, like the melodies are a bit lightly considered, like it's falling apart, like it was written and committed to tape in a few spontaneous minutes and never questioned again. Ok, now clearly it is falling apart and disintegrating and it's on purpose. This spiraling out section. It's kind of like the whole world is being sucked slowly into a black hole. The "ship is malfunctioning". Really going into deep space. Meanwhile, lyrically its as if the narrator is undergoing a psychotic transformation via having failed to communicate. Its an image of the most ordinary scene, literally hanging out in a bar. (I cringe a bit hearing this subject matter from KD tbh.) Disillusionment with the world of social bullshit. You're playing a role and you know it. We're all living a lie in one way or another, at one moment or another, it's unavoidable. In a moment, communication fails. Reality starts coming down in on your head, depression, self doubt, the futility of the social game, is there any way out at all? I've been there for sure. Its sort of a Jekyll and Hyde moment, with the narrator confusing internal and external realities, and turning to destruction.

The music converges on the moment when the narrator finds himself fully transformed in his destructive aspect and murders his interlocutor!
I didn't understand it this way the first couple times I listened. Initially I kind of just thought the lyrics were unexpectedly lame and that the vortexing section was not at all memorable. Everything from "Potential under icy moon" onward is so spot on amazing. No one else would ever do a thing like that. Totally unique and surreal, and the point at which the conceptual form of the piece is revealed. It wasn't a song at all, but uses a highly conventional song-form as a setting in order to bring a bigger, quite unique idea to life. Really fucking cool. Yet still, each time I come back around I'm frustrated thinking that the unraveling section leading to transformed reconvergence is now a trademark KD technique. It's been used in different forms on a few different records now. It's on Gamma Knife, Hubardo, CotE sort of, even harkens back to Bizarre Flowers/A Violet Mist! And this is the least fun and interesting it's ever been. And then even having changed my idea of where the lyrics are coming from, I can't not cringe every time. And all of this consumes the biggest chunk of a very short LP. Idk idk idk idk

Not feeling this tbh

Are these essays worth reading btw

So worth reading imho

Really if anyone is wondering the same, I think hardcore KD fans who felt disappointed with this album might be comforted by the bullshit I've written above. If you're not too invested it's probably a waste of time. I ordinarily wouldn't be doing any of this internet opining stuff, but I've come down with the feels over some things on this record that seem obvious to me, and that no one else is saying yet. I thought I'd be honest and just say it.

Yea im gonna need a second opinion tbqf

http://www.viraloptic.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/KayoDot.png?itok=dguB1-MR

Are there lyrics missing? I'm following along while listening, and am hearing a lot more lines in "All the Pain..." than are printed here so far.

I highly recommend reading the lyrics as you listen! It really enhanced my reading of both the music and the printed words. I think that's important here.

Yeah, the "No one listens can't you hear me I'm talking" part is an extrapolation from later on in the lyrics. My theory is, the printed words are the lyrics that Byron gave Toby to work from, and that somewhere in the process Toby made that embellishment in order to make the narrative evident in the music.
Leaving out / adding lyrics to the written text has been a KD TM since CotE really.

Yeah I heard a lot of other lyrics and strange vocal stuff, that makes sense. I love KD, but don't fanboy over everything they release like some of their fans seem to, and understand a lot of sentiments that've been stated here. I found more enjoyment on this when I concentrate on what the guitars are specifically doing, and on the lyrics and dynamic tonal shifts this has. High Quality setting on Spotify also makes it sound better than the Soundcloud stream.

In terms of how I'm feeling about this, I thought Animals said it pretty well. I also love this and Coffins a lot, probably more than most fans of the band. The "Jumble Human Bones..." chorus in All The Pain is so mesmerizing, and the lyrics in Magnetism are fantastic. I'm getting a lot of Perdition City and Bladerunner vibes from this and Coffins, and I know Toby had stated that the latter was a major inspiration. Overall I slightly prefer Coffins, but this might grow to be just as good for me with more listens. This is certainly one of their more challenging, which is saying a lot for them.

I can definitely see what you mean. These songs structures have similarities to KDs past efforts and they utilize similar patterns. The atmosphere on this, however, strikes me as something that they haven't attempted yet.

Yes, incredible lyrics on Magnetism! (If simply that foremost synth sound on Magnetism was different than it is, not sequencing, a slightly different timbre, just taken out altogether, something, I would probably think it was a pretty gnarly piece on the whole. The imagery is too good. As it is that synth, frankly, is the *main* element on the entire album that's making me have a hard time with the whole thing; the moment around 3:20 being the apogee of what I -can't even-.)
For the most part, really great lyrics as always. Rings of Earth's are just crushing. Some of the imagery from urban daily life are tough for me, I just prefer not to hear that subject matter in music, no matter how surrealistically contextualized, but that's my problem.

Agreed Animals. And glomp I see the lyrics being almost exclusively alien and futuristic, I don't think it's supposed to reflect modern urban life, at least not exclusively. The closest thing I can think of in comparison would be films like Bladerunner and Brazil, but this is very much its own thing. The darker, more occult themes that Toby Driver has explored in the past are also there in some parts.

I'm seeing it being kind of spread out thematically, based on the lyrics alone come to think of it...
Amalia's theme seems to take place in a kind of hovering dual-reflected digital-organic plane, "futuristic" but in the sense that our present world is already "the future". The /touchscreen/ reflects, the /pool/ reflects, a piece of present-day technology and something as eternal as water compared, then inside and outside of that, a place as materially ordinary and solid as a /hotel/; /Amalia/ reading to me as a sort of bridge between past present and future, the calm acceptance that this half dead technological nightmare world has come to be, perhaps just as it was always meant to. Simultaneous to the transcendence of that, the inherent anxiety of the moment, the natural desire to escape in basic self destructive ways. (She's smoking and drinking, etc. Pretty of the moment specifically, but timeless in essence.) Clouds in the sky float over the transforming ages forever.

All the Pain on its own could easily be set in the present. A bar.

Magnetism is more phantasmagoric than can be pinned to any particular place and time, but there is /concrete/ that has /cracked/.

Rings of Earth, the technological and cosmic themes reflect a daily reality of modernity from an omnitient perspective, always there but ordinarily unseen. Literally humans have made Earth into an artificially ringed planet as of today. Satellites orbit constantly, communicating with and observing the mass of humanity, which operates as if on mechanical autopilot. ("Awake in the day, sleep in the night, awake in the day, sleep in the grave.") The satellites a /ring of eyes/, reflecting the eyes of the damned rolling out from within the earth in Magnetism. (The damned being our earthly dependent human selves, being that we /avoid/ ourselves and our interconnectedness, othering, looking in braindead futility to find an outside cause for our problems.) The satellites an "alien" thing that humans created to watch themselves watching themselves slowly commit a sort of mass suicide. (We are the "alien", self-overthrowing.)

Then suddenly the shininess, celestial imagery and urban decay is replaced with sandy, papery, dry, granular, organic textures, on a bedroom scale in Brittle Urchin. So human and personal. "A dented page of paper from a drawing diary". Super direct Toby Driver autobiographical?

I like this a lot, although not quite as much as Coffins or Hubardo. Bookends really tie this together for me.

Talons, Brazil on this one for sure!

You guys can preorder my book, "Kayo Dot's Plastic House on Base of Sky: Suburban-Celestial Seppuku" by calling
1-800-KAYO-DOT-PLS-JUST-MAKE-COTE-PART-TWO-GODDAMN-IT

(I don't wish for CotE pt.2 btw, am just super hilarious comedy guy T_T)

Currently writing a monster review for this, Phobos is really breaking me out the reviewing rut I recently found myself in. Each listen reveals more and more to discover, and is an easy AOTY contender. The last two songs are amazing, and have some of Driver's best vocals imo

Get it ToF! Really looking forward to hearing more in-depth analysis on this for some reason.

Agreed, it's definitely unfurling nicely. I do love the vocal performances throughout, I'd agree they're some of his best yet. So many subtle shades.

In other news, I just got the record and am listening to it through the built-in speakers on a shitty 80s portable record player. Sounding awesome to me. Feeling a little lighter right now. Beholding the complete package is making me wish I hadn't known anything about it until right now, hadn't listened to the preview singles or stream. F the internet man.

ggglllooommmppp is my favourite novelty account

@parksungjoon
Big ups fam, appreciate the support. To show how much it means to me, here's a signed headshot of myself just for you: http://i.imgur.com/mx2rjd9.jpg?1

dam that popsicle looks pretty cheap

Yeah, I get that a lot

Ok now I think the fake lineup is pretty funny... just that the names are so the names of a person who would play the corresponding instrument. It's pretty uncanny really. Fuckin' Beauty and the Beast clock and candlestick shit.

"The last two songs are amazing, and have some of Driver's best vocals imo"



Damn right Talons.


AotY contender for me too. Looking forward to the review.

What are some of your other AotY contenders my dudes?

This year's been an amazing one for music. Along with this my top pics are Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool, Novembre - Ursa, Hammock - Everything and Nothing, Yndi Halda - Under Summer, and Deftones - Gore. Other great releases I'd recommend are The Jezabels - Synthia, Katatonia - The Fall of Hearts, Woods - City Sun Eater In The River Of Light, the new Thrice, new Explosions in the Sky, new Ulver, new Astronauts, and my favorite extreme metal of the year would be the new Gorguts and Vektor.

A Moon Shaped Pool here too, and Blackstar. Apart from these three I haven't really been that impressed this year thus far I have to say.

damn that's a really exciting selection Talons

http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/71069/Kayo-Dot-Plastic-House-on-Base-of-Sky/

Posted the review