Edit: I've come to appreciate this album more over the years. I still have some hangups in spots,
and it's not one of my favorite bits of the KD discography, but it can hang.
Original comments:
Not bad compared to music in general, but leagues off the bottom of the chart in the context of
Kayo Dot, imho. Can't wait for them to get bored of both futurism and linear/pop music really. In
regard to some of the timbral decisions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k0SmqbBIpQ
Definitely lots of cool and interesting material here, some amazing moments, and the unique
perspective of the composer shining through some unexpected lenses, but feels like it could've
used a few more passes of consideration in bringing it together, across the individual pieces
and album as a whole.
There's a sense of lacking gestalt for the first time ever on a KD record. The arc of the album's
journey feels fractured and incomplete. A collection of songs that mostly happen to be synth-
heavy – which at times feels imposed in order to generate cohesion. Tensions neither resolve
nor combust, but modulate slightly across the album's duration. Sections seem more arrayed in
sequence than motivationally developed from one to the next. This is without a doubt the least
dynamic and most rectangular/modular of their works, on all axes. All of this could be
intentional, certainly. They've proven mastery of absurdist juxtapositions and uncomfortably
wrong moves in the past. Here for the first time it doesn't seem to add up to all that much of
real consequence to my ears.
Beyond the shock of freshness on the sonic surface, there are some pretty decent songs
here... as in songs that would have been the "pretty good" tracks on a classic Cure record.
Albeit, often with a characteristically bizarre twist somewhere, which, totally cool and
borderline conceptual in regard to pop music and idiom as such moments are, there's not
terribly much here that feels absolutely essential, unforgettable, definitive, inimitable,
groundbreaking, truly conceptual in the way that many of the band's toweringly inspired and
iconic compositions of the past have been.
The more I listen, the more I'm grasping the internal logic, and my intellectual appreciation is
growing gradually. Instinctively though, my admiration and dismay are locked in stalemate.
Ultimately, my feeling boils down to the band's legacy.
I've come to expect things beyond the level of mere mortals from Kayo Dot, because they've
only ever delivered on that level hitherto.
PHoBoS is their first flawed piece of work, in my book.
*Pours out a 40 of Chernobyl Piss*
See you next time, space cowboy. |
