Experimental ambience.
“Blue Lambency Downward” is an experimental soundscape essentially; each track’s layers of noise explore complex time signatures, using off kilter rhythms from the drums as their base and with all the other instruments following the percussion in a meandering and playfully jagged dance, you get lead everywhere except in a straight line. The record starts beautifully; a melancholy lone riff breaks the silence on the title track, its eerie echoes make you shiver, the illusion is soon broken though when the vocals come in. The vocals are as unconventional as the unstructured tunes and as things progress it’s hard not to think sometimes that this is a record that would benefit from being totally instrumental, they really do take some getting used to, but gradually grow on you.
‘Cleilia Walking’ has a moody, dark Lynchian quality - jazz inspired woodwind starts the track off, guitar, keyboard, violin and numerous other instruments take over, sometimes so many they are difficult to identify because they appear when you least expect them to. As with many of Kayo Dot’s tunes this one goes through sections of heartbreakingly plaintive melody and disconcerting walls of jagged noise. On this track and the following one, ‘Right Hand Is The One I Want’, the vocals finally begin to make sense; ‘Right Hand...’ is like a slow lounge-jazz number, the free-style feel is stabilised by an almost coherent melody and the vocals sway in and out like one of the other many instruments as part of the landscape.
Depending on your point of view this album could be a challenging experience but one that’s impressively put together and rewards the listener with patches of loveliness, or a tangled, experimental web of off-kilter noises and rhythm. It is however most definitely not boring.