I figured with all the BCSL reviews I'd take a little change of pace and do something COMPLETELY different. This review was originally way longer, but I decided to cut it way down, and try to take the album as a whole rather than on a song by song basis, which is what I originally had done.
Toby Driver
In the L..L.. Library Loft
2005
Avant-Garde
Most who know of Toby Driver know him from the two large bands he has led over his career: first the experimental metal band maudlin of the Well and then the experimental, but not so much metal, band Kayo Dot. Even within the seven combined albums they have recorded lies a body of work more varied than most bands would create in twice as many albums - from crushing death metal to ethereal acoustic ballads to jazz rock, 'weird' is one of the few terms that could adequately describe their full body of work. With Driver at the helm of both these bands, one would expect his solo album to be similar in nature. One would also be sorely mistaken in doing so.
And that brings me to
In the L..L.. Library Loft, Driver's first and currently only solo album. While the album shares some musical roots with motW and Kayo Dot, in no way could it be confused with either of these bands. Between the album's four songs you will see dozens of styles: drone metal, avant-garde, post metal, ambient, avant-garde classical, and more. (Note: I've included Driver's description of each of the songs at the bottom of the review, as I feel these give an adequate background of the album in terms of individual songs) While the songs vary wildly between each other, there is a certain continuity in the atmosphere and texture they carry - the album as a whole is dark, brooding, and unsettling; a comparison to a band like Godspeed You! Black Emperor is not out of reach. The album's opening track
Kandu Vs. Corky (Horrorca) is an unnerving composition as layers of rising and falling drums, guitars, and strings build together, culminating in a nervous climax as Driver's screams bore into your mind. This is in stark contradiction to the haunting ambiance of
Brown Light Upon Us, a stark drone-oriented piece where the band played in a seperate room from the microphone, giving the song an wonderfully eerie atmosphere.
Overall Driver's first solo effort covers an immense amount of ground, yet manages to remain focused, keeping the album tightly bound despite its mass. Though its certainly not for everyone, fans of bands such as Kayo Dot and Godspeed You! Black Emperor may just find an gem of an album that fills a space in their library no other album has filled.
4/5
Kandu vs. Corky (Horrorca)
This one's a microtonal piece that loves bell-shaped things. The rhythm is basically a bell-curve shape over and over again, and some of the instrumentation (bells, and sine waves) are themselves bell-shaped. Part of the original idea was to mic things really loud but play them extra-quietly, so that they sounded really artifact-laden on tape. The strings at the beginning use this idea, as well as some of the cymbals, which we miked right above the rim of each, and a simple touch would produce an insanely resonant bass tone. All these things working together create an extremely undulatious take on contemporary drone-metal.
electric guitar, bells, sine waves, drum kit (2), upright bass, electric bass, violin, trombone, euphonium, trumpet, vocal.
The Lugubrious Library Loft
This clustonic piece is based on the need for two persons to perform each instrument. For example, the piano requires a player on the keyboard and a player malleting the strings simultaneously, and so on for each instrument. As for the vocals, one person was to sing only the notes in an "ah" while the second person skillfully inserted their lips, tongue, and teeth into the first person's mouth and moved them around a bit to form the enunciations.
prepared piano, string piano, bowed tuning forks, tuning fork pattycake, two-tongue vocals, electric bass, electric guitar, violin.
Brown Light Upon Us
The idea behind this one was to just have a band play in one room, and place the microphone in another room behind walls and closed doors. I wrote the song with those things in mind, trying to use sounds, rhythms, harmonies, etc. that would result in a song that sounded right only when listened to from one room over - in other words, if you heard it in the room it was being played in, it wouldn't sound as good. The ambient quality of the song would obviously have to be pretty important, to discourage the listener from listening in a way that they were used to doing. I've heard plenty of music that has haunted me most when drifting in from a far-off hall, most often piano music. Never with a metal band though, so i was trying to capture the same vibe here with that instrumentation.
electric guitar, drum kit, electric bass, remote snare drum.
Eptaceros
Kayo Dot's trumpetist at the time had been experimenting with interesting extended-technique trumpet sounds. I was interested in hearing his technique in a different context, so I wrote a song based on that, "Eptaceros" means "seven-horn," an appropriately haunting title for one of the most beautiful and bleak pieces I have ever written.
cello (2), electric guitar, piano, trumpet, vocal.
https://www.kayodot.net/toby/LLLL.html ^^
https://www.kayodot.net/kayodot/index.php?text=buy (I'd buy it from here, its the same price with free shipping, and I'm pretty sure Toby gets more money out of it)
https://www.amazon.com/L-L-Library-Loft-Toby-Driver/dp/B000B5UNJ2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1245998591&sr=8-1
Topic: [Music] Toby Driver - In the L..L.. Library Loft (Read 5342 times)