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Biography
The Legendary Pink
Dots are the ultimate cult band. From their enormous discography
(much of it out of print or released only in limited editions)
to their bizarre lead singer (Edward Ka-Spel sounds like a gothic
Syd Barrett who can't pronounce his R's), everything about them
screams "We're cooler than you!" They've also got their
own mythology, in which 834 is "the new number of the beast,"
and a complex system of private symbols, from infinity waltzes
to pale green poststamps. Add in connections to esteemed
experimentalists Nurse With Wound and Current 93, and you're
pretty much guaranteed cult status. Best of all, though,
is the story of how they started: according to rumor, Ka-Spel
and some friends were wandering in the woods when they heard
some music, and when they followed the sound they discovered
a band giving a concert to nobody in the middle of nowhere,
complete with light show and platform. At that moment
they decided to start their own band, and Ka-Spel learned how
to read music, sing and play keyboards in order to make it possible.
As for the music
itself, it's enormously varied. Their early material is
twisted gothic synthpop, played on extremely low-budget synths
but infused with a distinct flair for the unexpected melody
or transition. Starting with 1985's Asylum, they
became more ambitious, leading to a period of what I can only
describe as "experimental electronic goth-prog," which lasted
through 1990's The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse. After
that they moved into more minimalistic regions for a while (epitomized
by the highly experimental Malachai, which was produced
by Nurse With Wound's Steve Stapleton), before arriving at a
type of dark psychedelia in the late 90s. Even within
those periods, the band steadfastly refuses to be pinned down
-- within a given album there can be found scraps of everything
from 20th century classical to industrial to ambient.
I've never understood
why this band seems to go ignored by prog fans. They've
got everything the genre is supposed to be about -- diverse
influences, complex structures, a taste for experimentation
-- without any of the problems that sometimes bring it
down. Ka-Spel even cites Can among his favorite bands,
which ought to draw the Krautrock crowd. Ah well.
Maybe it's the drum machines :) -
Alex Temple [October 2001]
 Asylum
(1985)
On their
first few albums, the Legendary Pink Dots played a sort of lo-fi
gothic Casio-pop. The music was fun and a bit strange,
but not particularly progressive. 1985's Asylum
changed all that completely. The primitive synths and
dark overtones are still here, but there are also songs of up
to eleven minutes, and there's an atmosphere of experimentalism
that goes far beyond anything they'd done before. It was
also their first double album, their first album produced by
Steven Stapleton of ambient/noise/collage gods Nurse With Wound,
and the first time lead singer Edward Ka-Spel identified himself
as "The Prophet" in the line-up.
Strangely, the
album starts out very weakly. The opening of "Echo Police"
is mediocre and rather ordinary, a lot like something off of
their previous album, The Tower. But two minutes
in, it suddenly starts doing what can only be described as "rocking
out" -- except that there are no guitars, drums or basses, only
synthesizers. The music begins to take on Middle Eastern
overtones, and when guitars finally appear just before the four-minute
mark, they're treated in such a way that they actually sound
more like keyboard synths than guitars.
This in itself
is not much more experimental than the stranger moments of the
Dots' earlier work. But the rest of side one of the first LP
is something else entirely -- a suite of pieces that have more
to do with 20th-century classical music than with synthpop.
"Gorgon Zola's Baby" is an echoey, highly rhythmic collage of
strange noises, drum machines and Bach samples, over which is
overlaid a surrealistic spoken-word narrative. It leads
directly into "Fifteen Flies in the Marmalade," a waltz for
accordion and violin, with disturbing sing-song vocal delivery
from Ka-Spel. "Femme Mirage" goes even further afield,
throwing rhythm entirely out the window in favor of flowing
atonal vocal lines from Julia Niblock Waller of the experimental
gothic band Attrition (listed here as "Poison Barbarella"),
suspended over a complex ambient patchwork of electronic bleeps
and high, George-Crumb-like violin sounds. And then, proving
that the Dots are not here to conform to your expectations,
they throw in "The Hill," a cracked electro-pop song with fun
sound effects and a cute story about school shootings.
Before they were trendy, of course.
Side two brings
"Demonism/Prisoner," which fuses Bartókian violin melodies
with proto-techno and more demented vocals from Ka-Spel, this
time reaching near-Hammill levels of melodrama. Concluding
the first LP is "So Gallantly Screaming," which may be the Dots
single most ambitious track. It opens with two minutes
of dissonant string orchestra music, ends with a barrage of
electronic noise and two bars of ragtime-ish quotation, and
in between manages to include everything from ambient electronics
to spoken-word vocals to fake Chinese music to channel-changing
sound collage (think Aksak Maboul's "Age Route Brra!").
It also contains some unsettlingly poetic, post-apocalyptic
lyrics from Ka-Spel which, while a bit exaggeratedly "dark"
at times, contain some really interesting phrases: "God bless
America; God bless what's left... and what's right... and what's
wrong... well, we still have the songs, but where are you, Gershwin,
now that we need you?" When he repeats the phrase "God
how I need you right now" later in the song, his perfectly tortured
delivery makes my hair stand on end.
You may notice
that Asylum is a double album. We all know what
that means -- filler material! In this case, it's pretty
much all concentrated on the second LP. Admittedly, there
is some nice stuff here; "I am the Way, the Truth the Light"
shows off Ka-Spel's acute sense of the emotional effect of pronounciation,
and "Golden Dawn" is a pretty good song in the tradition of
the Dots' first four studio albums, complete with primitive
synth arpeggios and depressing lyrics about abandoning someone
after a one-night stand. But most of the second LP is
fairly forgettable. "Go Ask Alice," for instance, is three
and a half minutes of conversation, which might be interesting
if not for the fact that the vocals are reversed, making it
impossible to understand what's being said. "Agape" is
by far the worst track on the album, proving that Julia Waller's
voice is far too "pretty" to use for anything consonant.
Only one track
saves the second half of the album: "This Could Be The End."
This is long and incredibly dark -- sort of a sequel to "So
Gallantly Screaming." Low pipe organ chords dissolve into
a darkly beautiful texture of violins, noise and slowly plunking
bass synthesizers. Looped background noises and trickling
water underscore demonic Medieval chants: "Your pain is
for you alone, as it is, as it was, as it will be forever, amen."
Echoey female laughter appears out of nowhere. The silence
at the end suddenly interrupts into Penderecki-like scraping
noises. If you're looking for something to play in a dark
room in the middle of the night, you've found exactly the right
track.
A final note:
although this was originally a double LP, the rerelease is a
single CD. This is both bad, because the four sides of
the album have very distinct identities, and good, because you
can skip over the bad songs on LP 2 more easily. The CD release
also doesn't contain any information about the line-up, which
gives the album an even more mysteriously cult-like aura than
the aliases used on the LP. Whatever.
- Alex Temple [October 2001]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
 Island
of Jewles (1986)
To my ears, this
is the moment when everything really came together for the Legendary
Pink Dots. In a way, though, it's hard to know what to
make of the album. It's easy to see it as the end of an
era for the band -- the last album with drum machines, and a
natural extension and refinement of the experimentation of 1985's
Asylum. At the same time, it feels in some ways
like a transitional album, bridging the gap between Asylum's
craziness and Any Day Now's much calmer (and, to these
ears, blander) mix of late 80's post-psychedelic pop and almost-symphonic
prog. And bridging it very successfully, too: here are
all the wild ideas of the previous album without any of the
missteps, and the fuller, more satisfying textures of its successor
without its sense of being too "pretty." The songs are
short, too -- a very good thing, since the concision emphasizes
the album's dramatic structure and prevents it from rambling
like some of the Dots' later work does.
Like many LPD
albums, Island of Jewels is split in two halves, the
first more experimental and the second more lyrical. The
first half may be the best album side the Dots have ever done.
(Well, OK, I'll admit that the brief intro, "Tower 6," is fairly
disposable.) It has an enormous stylistic range, from the clanging,
gothic "Jewel on an Island" to "Emblem Parade," a dissonant
piece for string orchestra and drum machine. There are
also two industrial pieces: side one closes with "Rattlesnake
Arena," in which two synth notes an octave apart oscillate relentlessly
for nearly the entire song, while Edward Ka-Spel sings modal
melodies accompanied by what can only be called melodic noise.
The song ends with a chilling passage in which distorted
voices cry "glory glory, hallelujah," while the pitch bend knob
is spun rapidly. Then there's "The Dairy," complete with harsh
violin tremolos, a surprisingly danceable beat, and clever but
repulsive lyrics about making a porn movie -- lines like "Keep
them creaming at the dairy / Pumping lonesome 'cross the prairie"
and "Russians do it best, well don't they, Jerkov?" Lest
you think that sounds stupid, what makes the song great (aside
from the incisiveness of the music) is Ka-Spel's pronounciation:
he sounds disgusted with his own lyrics, spitting them out to
create what may be the epitome of contempt in music.
Most surprising
of all, though, is "The Red and the Black," which is unique
even in the Dots' varied output. The vocals are half-spoken,
half-sung, and the tonality is obscured by the accompaniment,
which consists of a seemingly random but deliciously effective
string of jazzy runs for piano and saxophone -- avant-lounge,
perhaps? If this weren't strange enough, it's interrupted
halfway through with about five seconds of post-Baroque harpsichord
playing and electronic crash-and-bang, before turning into a
clean, beautiful psychedelic pop song, accompanied by drum machines
of early 80s vintage. In a way, the song sums up what
makes this album so good: the band's melodic sensibilities
and their avant-gardist tendencies are perfectly in balance.
And then there's
side two. As mentioned, this is (mostly) a showcase of
the band's more melodic side, although it's about as "normal"
as the second half of Kate Bush's The Dreaming.
In the area of tunes, the Dots have improved dramatically since
Asylum. Except for the rather awkward "The Shock of Contact,"
which is unquestionably the nadir of the album, the melodies
have become more elaborate, more sophisticated, more interesting
and, oddly, more sensuous. The arrangements are much fuller
than the typically stark synth + drum machine + violin of previous
albums, and the songs are absolutely teeming with texturally
beautiful moments like the staccato guitar-and-violin counterpoint
in "Our Lady in Chambers," or the dissonant plinks suspended
over drone chords that outline the rhythm of "Our Lady in Darkness."
The latter song ends with one of the "proggiest" sections the
Dots have ever done, a beautiful pseudo-classical instrumental
passage in 7/8 that almost sounds like an alternate-universe
take on Gentle Giant. At the same time, these songs have
a lot more edge to them than a song like "Laguna Beach" from
Any Day Now. "Nice" melodies are undermined by
creepy bass notes, or interrupted by dissonant piano chords.
Even "The Guardians of Eden," a very tonal and conventionally
tuneful piece, keeps itself out of the realm of the merely pretty
by maintaining an unsettling major-minor ambiguity and ending
just a bit too abruptly to let the listener feel truly calm.
I have to warn
anyone reading this review that there's a decent chance you
won't like this album as much as I do. It's hard to argue
with the compositions here -- they're probably the most perfect
in the entire LPD catalogue -- or with Ka-Spel's absolutely
brilliant use of accent and pronounciation for dramatic effect,
particularly in the terrifying "Our Lady in Kharki." But
the arrangements really do sound very dated, rife with digital
pianos, drum machines and, on "Jewel in the Crown," a slightly
cheesy guitar tone. For me, that only adds to the appeal;
I like 80s-sounding stuff, and the tension between high art
and low production has intrigued me for years. But if
you're the type to find those sounds really bothersome, you
might want to give this a pass.
- Alex Temple [February 2002]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
 The
Crushed Velvet Apocalypse (1990)
The
Crushed Velvet Apocalypse
is definitely a creative step up from the Legendary Pink
Dots' previous two releases. While it doesn't reach
the perfection of their 1986 release, Island of Jewels,
it shares some of that album's eclecticism (and even makes
direct musical and lyrical references to it). As a
result, it's one of the Dots' better releases, if a bit
lacking in cohesion.
The excellent
first half of the album is particularly varied. "I
Love You In Your Tragic Beauty" is probably the first acoustic
Dots song, with a dark chamber-folk feel and traces of Syd
Barrett in the vocal style. Spicing up this already
beautiful song are an accordion part that seems to be in
a different key from the rest of the music, a brief section
featuring sampled voices, and what seems to be an explicit
reference to the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun." "The
Green Gang" is an homage to a very different side of psychedelia,
opening with sounds of flowing water, synthesized drones,
sitars and snatches of Indian percussion. The percussion
gradually organizes itself into a regular rhythm before
the music breaks into a brief tribal-psychedelic jam in
the tradition of pieces like the Rolling Stones' "Sing This
All Together (See What Happens)." This, in turn, gives
way to a scary sing-song incantation to the "Green God,"
punctuated by demented cries of "RED ALERT!" and bursts
of chaotic noise. The sing-song aspect of the song
is picked up by "Hellsville," where it is transformed into
a vicious industrial dance, dripping with anger and full
of blunt saxophone grunts and disembodied guitar playing.
"Hellowe'en" abstracts the noiser, more metallic aspects
of "Hellsville" into a weird little electronic piece that
sounds like Nurse With Wound's entire oeuvre condensed into
a minute and a half.
Unfortunately,
as with many Dots albums, the second half of The Crushed
Velvet Apocalypse is somewhat less interesting than
the first. Putting four fairly somber songs in a row
is already not a great idea, but the real problem is the
fact that that these songs seem to retread melodic paths
the Dots have already taken many times, adding to the archetype
only in texture and arrangement. "The Death of Jack
the Ripper," for example, is the obligatory clunky mechanical-sounding
piece, complete with tormented vocals and weird sound effects.
"The Safe Way" sounds a lot like a weaker mid-80s Dots track,
only moderately engaging and rather forgettable except for
some more disturbing moments when rumbling bass noise threatens
to overwhelm the music. "Just a Lifetime" is familiar-sounding
almost to a fault, and also suffers from some lapses in
taste: its cool 16th-century riffing is brought down by
the somewhat cheesy, 80s-sounding guitar soloing at the
end, as well as the first faint trace of almost new-agey
sax playing from Neils van Hoorn, which would mar many a
90s Dots release. These songs are by no means bad,
but they are quite a disappointment after the excellent
first half. Luckily, the closing "New Tomorrow" has
enough meat to it to bring the album to a satisfying finish,
with its unexpected combination of mellow, depressive synth
pulses and flamenco-ish acoustic guitar playing.
But even this song doesn't really get that interesting until
about halfway in, when Edward Ka-Spel starts using the less
complacent-sounding upper register of his voice, filtered
through some interesting effects.
The inclusion
of four extra tracks on the CD release of The Crushed
Velvet Apocalypse does little to help the already flagging
dramatic curve of the album. Of these, "C.V.A." is
a brilliant and truly nightmarish collage of samples from
various parts of the album (a bit like the end of the Beatles'
"Strawberry Fields Forever", only much more so), while the
rest comprise the Princess Coldheart EP, released
on vinyl earlier in 1990. This EP is a bit hit-or-miss:
the much-beloved title track has an infectious pseudo-Renaissance
tune and interesting instrumentation (including sax, timpani
and what sounds like trombone), but gets awfully bombastic
during the choruses. "The Pleasure Palace" is a nasty,
gritty, stomping industrial piece, with Ka-Spel's voice
filtered through about a dozen ring modulators. Unfortunately,
it's just a bit monotonous for eight minutes, and the evil
circus fanfare in the middle is far too short. Fortunately,
"The Collector" is a really excellent song, featuring the
kind of delirious vibrato that pops up occasionally on Henry
Cow's Western Culture (think "Falling Away") and
a creepy, loping rhythm somewhere in between "Pink Elephants
on Parade" and the Olivia Tremor Control's "Black Foliage
(itself)." It does meander a bit, what with the quiet,
airy organ waltz in the middle and the spoken word bit at
the end, but the sections are all so good that it doesn't
matter.
Overall, this
CD is a very good release from an extremely uneven band.
The best songs are certainly on a par with their best material,
and even the worst songs have something to recommend them.
I will admit that I find this album a bit "colder" than
some of the Dots' other albums, by which I mean that its
appeal is more aesthetic and intellectual than visceral
and emotional. But hey, what's wrong with that?
- Alex
Temple [November 2001]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
 Chemical
Playschool 10 (1997)
This album
is pretty representative of the mediocrity of the Legendary
Pink Dots' output in the latter half of the 90s. Actually,
it wasn't recorded as an album per se, but is a collection
of tracks recorded between 1993 and 1997, originally released
only at the band's live shows in 1997. Still, Dots
fans generally consider it one of their better recent releases,
so I thought I'd give it a try.
For starters,
a few songs on here are quite good. "Scarlet Wish"
in particular stands out -- a driving song in which Ka-Spel's
plaintive, flowing vocal lines are held up by a truckload
of darkly atmospheric synths and keyboard sounds cut up
and collaged into a mechanical groove. "Colour Wheel"
is also worth mentioning, mainly because of a rather interesting
recurring melodic motif, which switches instruments about
five times in its three-second lifespan, starting with what
sounds like a synthesized celesta and ending with what sounds
like a synthesized tuba. "Little Romeo" is an interesting
abstracted take on metal, with the thick texture clearly
overshadowing the almost nonexistent tune and some vicious
drumming from Cevin Key of Skinny Puppy and Download fame.
But overall,
the album strikes me as extraordinarily pointless. "The
Disaster Area" and "Nouveaux Modes Exotiques" are tedious
jams, and "Kleine Juliet," while texturally very interesting
(a lot of noise, percussion, electronic zizzing and dripping),
runs out of actual content before too long. "Premotion
19" is the obligatory long ambient track, but its atmosphere
doesn't grab me. "The Man with the Cut-Glass Heart",
another depressive ballad, just makes me wonder why Ka-Spel
doesn't have anything better to do than sing about broken
relationships after 15 years -- especially since the track
is mostly six minutes of endless post-industrial repetetiveness.
True, it does threaten to sprout a rather interesting keyboard-pretending-to-be-guitar
solo three and a half minutes in, but doesn't quite make
it. Another minute after that it tries again, and
this time it manages to hold on for an entire twelve seconds!
Oh, and then there are the spoken word pieces. Yes,
Edward, we all KNOW you can recite depressing lyrics over
spooky organ chords, or goofy lyrics over a vaguely psychedelic
backbeat. Now get over it and do something interesting!
So, yeah,
most of the album is pretty boring. "Wonderdome" goes
a step further and is actually annoying: more spoken-word
stuff over a backdrop of quiet metallic noise. The
lyrics are actually somewhat clever at times -- "They asked
for my ID / I showed them a birthmark" -- but there in the
background, all the way through, is Ka-Spel chanting "ba-dooby-doo
cha-chaaaaa" over and over again. Stupid. There's
a hidden track. It consists of some noise, some out-of-rhythm
drumming, and Ka-Spel shouting "Don't throw your crisps
packet at me, you alien bastard! Don't you dare throw
your crisps packet at me! I don't like your alien
crisps, you foul fiend of Hell." It's actually one
of the more engaging tracks on here, which should tell you
something. -
Alex Temple [February 2002]
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