Thing of the Day
TARTAR LAMB, the quieter side of New York's Kayo Dot, release a new album...
January 22nd 2011
TARTAR LAMB - Polyimage of Known Exits
Dark, gorgeous abstract spaciousness... no drums, but slow ebbs and
flows of sound. Tartar Lamb are the quieter, more strange and sinister
subconcious of Kayo Dot. Currently based in New York, Kayo Dot are a
band with a unique vision, a genuinely progressive, orchestral rock
band that carves its own furrow and frequently dazzles. Kayo
Dot blur the boundaries between genres of metal, avant jazz and
contemporary classical, but rather than going the way of heads-down
technical acrobatics they're about emotion, drama, moods of romantic
surrealism.
Like Kayo Dot (who mutated out of a previous, equally extraordinary
band, Maudlin of the Well), Tartar Lamb is helmed by composer/
multi-instrumentalist Toby Driver, and the line-ups share members - Mia
Matsumiya's heartwrenching violin, the synths, wind and other
instrumention of Terran Olson and Daniel Means, amongst others.
This is where Toby Driver gives the softest, subtlest side of
his vision the space to breathe, away from full drums and rigid
structure. There is a pattern, a framework of compostion here
- it's not quite improvisation, though you can feel the instruments
flex with each other. If I mention other abstract,
impressionistic bands - Rothko? - and you're not really going to be
getting Tartar Lamb - not the richness of colour, the scale and depth,
the sweet or disturbing melodies that drift and flow and interweave
with complexity and intention. This has feel and meaning, an almost
palpable feel of organic textures. Just not, not background
music - music for a darkened room...
So why dance about architecture when this very day the new Tartar Lamb compostion Polyimage of Known Exits has just been released? Uploaded to Soundcloud around 4 hours ago, at time of writing. Four melancholic, spellbinding movements, haunting opiate dreams and delicious nightmares.
Download, stream or buy Polyimage of Known Exits
Kayo Dot / Tartar Lamb European tour
The January/February European tour is a package featuring
Kayo Dot, Tartar Lamb, and Jeremiah Cymerman
Here's
the UK dates, the full European tour listing is at www.kayodot.net
13-Feb:- Brighton @ Hector's House
14-Feb:- Bristol - TBC
15-Feb:- London @ Vortex
16-Feb:- Birmingham @ Hare and Hounds
17-Feb:- Manchester @ Islington Mill
18-Feb:- Leeds @ The Well
Kayo Dot released a magnificent EP a couple of months-ago, entitled Stained Glass, available from Hydra Head - more info from www.kayodot.net, and loads of music to stream and download on the 'audio' page...
in fact, here's three extracts from their debut 'Choirs of the Eye':
Marathon
The
Manifold Curiosity
Wayfarer
...and the Organ review of the most recent Kayo Dot album (from ORGAN #267> JULY 24th '08):
ALBUM
OF THE WEEK
KAYO DOT - Blue
Lambency
Downward (Hydrahead) - This is not fast food. This is a
banquet of rare
ingredients and exquisite constructions, to be digested over days, not
minutes. It's sweet and beautiful and not for the
faint-hearted,
dripping with opiate languor in one place, curling into unsettling,
chilling
landscapes (landscapes out of the films of Jan Svankmeyer and Brothers
Quay) in another, building slowly slowly to a peak.
Kayo Dot - for all
intents the work of composer/multi-instrumentalist Toby Driver - are
masters
of the slow boil, the long journey. Listen to the samples of
their
2003 album Choirs Of The Eye on kayodot.net and you'll hear ranging
avant-thrashouts
that melt down to whispered poetry, and woozy, heat-hazed songs that
gradually
work up to thunderous metal denouements like an escalating arms race
no-one
can remember starting. Kayo Dot are, in common with any truly
great
creativity, almost impossible to describe.
A good deal of Blue Lambency Downward can be
compared to the more
abstract passages of A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers,
the legendary
twenty-minute masterwork of Van Der Graaf Generator. Kayo Dot
are
that avant, psychedelic sensibility concentrated and amplified; lusher,
more sensual. Their contemporaries are Time Of Orchids, equal in
mastery
of the romantic and hypercomplex. The lyrics are magnificently obtuse,
a fever dream of Dada and Coleridge, both absurd and deliciously
tactile,
and it all comes together on the opening, title track's swooning,
stuttering,
richly strange climax. Driver's elegant voice is endlessly
listenable,
part torch singer, recognisably from a rock background and wrapping
effortlessly
around some edgy melodics, hinting at middle-eastern quarter-tone
singing.
Violin (from, sax, clarinets, malletophone, organ and synthesizers take
equal parts to the band setup (and the synth throbs and drones are
treated
as part of the arrangements in a way few if any have succeeded
with).
Indeed, despite echoing the more psychedelic, stranger moments of Led
Zeppelin
this is barely a rock band, more a contemporary classical work that can
stand up to the high standards of that world, crossing over into
classic
and avant jazz. Having said that... The Awkward Wind Wheel is
the
heaviest, most straight-up piece on this album, showing The Mars Volta
how it should be done (apparently Kayo Dot are worshipped by
contingents
of Mars Volta campfollowers) and maybe referencing Voivod a
little.
Elsewhere, Right Hand Is The One I Want and the
opening build of
Symmetrical
Arizona meander into limpid backwaters, easy to get lost in
if you're
in a hurrying mood. That's the essence of listening to Kayo
Dot,
and Driver's previous band Maudlin Of The Well: take the whole journey
with them, wherever it goes go with it - the getting there makes the
peaks
and depths that much sweeter - www.kayodot.net
