Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#6)

6) KAYO DOT – Choirs Of The Eye (2003)

So imagine there’s this planet somewhere on the other side of the universe that’s quite similar to our own. The people have evolved in much the same way—discovering all those important things like fire, art, love, combustion engines and the aesthetic pleasure of seeing Richard Dean Anderson continually thwart the laws of nature. They had their own Bach, their own Beethoven, their own Les Paul, their own Beatles. In other words, music basically followed the same teleological pattern as on planet Earth. But things were… different, as you could probably predict. Their “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was somewhat comparable to ours, but if you heard it you would probably mistake it for the obscure 60s psych band July. (On this planet July got big… Really big. And so did this blog, which happens to be named after my favorite track of theirs. Pure coincidence.) Then forty years passed. Glam, prog and punk were quickly bypassed in favor of dream pop and doom metal. Sonic Youth ruled the planet from 1981 to 1987, after which Lord Thurston was deposed in favor of Lord Quorthon and his fearsome shipping fleet. By the time 2003 rolled around, music had branched off so far from the “norm” (i.e. what happened on Earth) that it had become completely unrecognizable. Sound itself became so dense that the heads of all the record companies were jailed for attempted murder after commencing the Loudness War. Nocturnal landscapes took precedence over summer in the sun. Brian Wilson went crazy on acid and drove his moon buggy into the ocean; Tim Buckley kicked his heroin habit and spent the rest of his life advancing the sound he established with Starsailor. Of course this extended metaphor is becoming tired, but I think you get the point by now. Whenever someone asks me what Kayo Dot sound like (they only ask because of that badass Dowsing Anemone… shirt I still wear once a week), I always give the same answer: “Music from another planet.” It’s that simple. I’ve tried “post-metal,” “jazz-doom,” and just plain “experimental,” but none of that works. A few years ago someone who was familiar with Maudlin Of The Well asked me what Kayo Dot sounds like in comparison. After about three days’ thought, my answer was: “If Maudlin Of The Well is the mind of a fisherman at shore, then Kayo Dot is the mind of some bizarre deep-sea creature that no one has ever discovered.” Nowadays when someone asks, I sometimes just play “The Manifold Curiosity” and grin evilly as their faces contort in terror and incomprehension. It’s a song that takes things as far as you thought a “song” could ever go—and then pushes it even further. That, my friends, is Kayo Dot.