Kayo Dot celebrate one decade of activity with their new album, Hubardo, a monstrous one and a half hour-long ordeal of beautiful and mesmerizing avant garde blackened doom. The album is a triumph for the band and a towering achievement in their ten year history for three reasons mainly. First of all it embodies perfectly, all in one place, everything that Kayo Dot is and has ever been. In recent times, the band had ventured into more goth-tinged and abstract post-rock composition leaving much of its metal roots behind. Hubardo maintains the trend but also brings back the crushing heaviness of albums like Choirs of the Eye and Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue, while even taking things even further on the heavy side of things, packing the album with an extra load of weird, twisted and mind-blowing heaviness and sonic evil we had not witnessed in their music ever before. Elements of Deathspell Omega, Gorguts, Beherit, and even Portal can be heard throughout the work, and all this horrific load of heaviness is once again beautifully wrapped in Kayo Dot’s notorious avant-jazz and free-form composition musical cocoon.
Titanic slabs of mortiferous doom seem to walk hand in hand with the graceful embrace of classical composition with extreme ease, and ugly and destructive fucking waves of sludgy doom wraps itself in gorgeous necocalssical patterns dominated by strings, pianos, organs and angelic chants, both walking hand in hand down the same path in impossible ways that are extremely hard to decipher but beautiful to listen to. Spams of vile black metal slither throughout, once again embraced by the beautiful and elegant touch of jazz structures creating moments of utter and baffling puzzlement where it almost sounds like Mayhem, Watain and Bohren & Der Club of Gore have sat down for a cup of tea and a chat. The second important element that shapes the triumph that this album is, is the incredible amount of spastic and ultra-structured sonic material this album yields with out seeming drawn out or pretentious. We are talking about a titanic hour and half of sonic deformity that could potentially run anyone’s patience into the ground in just a few minutes due to its overload of weirdness and its twisted and delirious approach to songwriting. But no, even with all the tempo changes, unpredictable metric shifts, bizarre soundscapes and constant hops in and out of genres, Kayto Dot have managed to keep everything unbelievably fluid and incredibly consistent and easy to listen to. There are one and half hours of obliterating weirdness in this album but for some reason it’s beauty is immediately apparent and is apparent consistently, start to finish, with out ever giving in to any confusion or loosening its grasp on the listeners sorry synapses. There is only one way to explain such a triumphant approach to such an ambitious musical vision and it is pretty simple: these guys have a gift in songwriting and in composition that does not belong to the common mortal or to the average bone-head metal band, and that goes beyond even what we can comprehend. And this is the third an final seal on the status of behemoth of this album: the fact that this puppy is obviously dominated by a musical talent and by a bravery in musical composition that is almost impossible to find elsewhere. Every second of this monstrous album literally breathes of staggering technical proficiency, mind-blowing dynamics and an underlying touch of genius that is absolutely impossible to deny. Overall this is hands fucking down one of the – if not THE – best avantgarde metal albums of the year. Hubardo is also entirely self-produced and self-released by the band, which is is a statement of creative purity and artistic independence that demands everyone’s undisputed respect. You can grab Hubardo straight from the band here, and no, don’t stop and think about it, just do your self a favor and go and get it.
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