Review by SilentScream213 for Kayo Dot - Choirs of the Eye (2003)

maudlin of the well released some of my favorite Avant-Garde Metal albums, a subgenre of Metal that is very hard to please me usually due to it either taking bizzarro experimentation way too far, or just sounding like circus Metal. maudlin of the well were very nearly guilty of the former, but the compositions were strong enough to offset the weakness, and the captivating, surreal atmospheres ensured everything was interesting.

Kayo Dot – at least on this album, the debut “Choirs of the Eye” – seem to have lost sight of that. Is there good stuff here? Absolutely. Is it sandwiched between long, droning droughts of meandering boredom or chaos? Absolutely.

Kayo Dot seem to continue the previous band’s trend of crafting songs that sound like dreams. Musically, lyrically, atmospherically, they succeed in this regard. The music sound like dreams. They are strange, ever-changing, jumping from one setting to another, random, surreal, spacy. Some are quiet, some are loud. Some are calming, some are frightening. And they all feel dreamlike. 

The issue is, plenty of us have dreams that are boring, or stressful, or nonsensical. Kayo Dot successfully captured not just the feeling of captivating dreams here, but also the mundane boredom of the dreams we forget, the stressful dissonance of dreams we rejoice upon waking up from, the fever dreams we find ourselves trapped in with a fever of 103.

…What I’m trying to say is, there’s a lot of fat here that could be trimmed off. I don’t want to feel bored or stressed out when listening to music, but “Choirs of the Eye” evokes just that often enough.

Of course, there’s also plenty of material that avoids that – calm and peaceful atmospheres of warmth, doomy dirges of darkness, dense layers of successful experimentation. The songs feel like surreal adventures. The adventures simply vary in enjoyability. 

A very unique album, a dense piece of work that rewards deep, in-depth listening. At the same time, a slight disappointment for someone who expected a bit more based on maudlin’s work.