Send "Kayo Dot " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 You really can’t pigeonhole Kayo Dot as a band. Calling them metal (and this would make sense, given their tenure at Hydra Head Records) is inaccurate at even the loosest definition. Avant-garde seems a little too pretentious. Free-form jazz is only a means of describing the stream of consciousness that seems to characterize their compositions. They are all of these things and yet, by some curious metaphysical principle, none of them at the same time. The press sheet for this release calls them “goth fusion”, a somewhat nebulous term in itself. I think that’s about as close to the mark the genre categorization is going to get.Coyote is their fourth record, so at some level they’re obviously doing something right in attaining the staying power needed to map out a career in the age of prescription drugs and meaningless awards from MTV. That said, there is something very personal and individualized about Kayo Dot that elevates them to a sort of cultish echelon only a select few see the true beauty of. Their sound has always flirted with, if not outright hit on, an off-the-cuff, jam-session quality that emphasizes the creation of a sonic landscape textured by some Byzantine aesthetic that amounts to an inside joke. Listening to them is like being the odd man out at a social function, a stranger desperately trying to interpret a conversation between longtime friends of which he knows nothing. The words, and even the general experiences, seem familiar, but the internalization and visualization in the proverbial mind’s eye is utterly alien. So when the concept behind Coyote – and this is a concept album, make no mistake – revolves around the story of Kayo Dot’s terminally-ill friend Yuko Sueta, there is an immediate sense of trespassing on something sacred and intimate. The songs revolve around a narrative of the moribund with minimum detail that makes the few points of emphasis seem that much more poignant, compelling, and revelatory. As if that weren’t enough, the sparseness of the guitar, the mournful sound of the horns and strings, the crisp pace of the drums, and song titles like “Whisper Infeffable” and “Abyss Hinge” all perfectly indicate the unburdening of a loved one’s secrets in the final moments before death. The vocals are hauntingly surreal in their infrequent turn as well, further compounding the sense of being adrift in a melancholic and foreboding film-noir dream....full text |
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| Dustedmagazine |
| The last time I looked at Kayo Dot, the big concern had to do with what genre they were in and how that skews expectations, especially if people expect them to be metal or try grouping them as metal. This grew out of the fact that a number of reviews tried to make something of lead composer Toby Driver’s metal background. With Coyote, the metal comparisons seem even more remote, as Kayo Dot is even further entrenched in the depths of modern composition and Rock In Opposition-descended genres, and perhaps the only thing it shares with avant-metal at this point is tone or atmosphere. And really , Coyote opens up even further, by having a symbolist dimension to the music. As Driver noted about the second song “Whisper Ineffable” in a recent Village Voice article, “The vibe and color changes throughout the movement — the opening is loneliness, and emptiness, feeling lost, which becomes action and fear, which becomes a violent spewing, which becomes a calm yet morbid resolution. The synth, by adding an element of non-pitch-oriented texture, hopefully extends the music three-dimensionally. Atmosphere!” The atonal quality in Coyote is interesting, as it’s not anxiety-producing, but has shades of foreboding and uneasiness. When I was looking at Extra Life, another Brooklyn band that seems descended in some way from an avant-prog/modern composition background, it was very apparent that the vocal style and instrumentation was used to evoke a heightened response in the listener. Driver’s compositional style, however, while still coming out of the same tradition and while still holding very atonal elements, is much gentler. The end result is not existential terror or anxiety, but rather a fluid, melodramatic feeling....full text |
Kayo Dot lyrics
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