by Jef Rouner

A music store’s status as “eclectic” is defined by one thing, and one thing only: Does it carry music by the Legendary Pink Dots? Quite possibly the most avant-garde of the avant-garde, the Holland-based psychedelic minstrels have never skipped Houston on their many North American tours. This time through, listen for works from the Dots’ latest album, Plutonium Blonde. Each Dots show is a truly transcendental experience that can only be described in the terms one would normally reserve for the throes of pagan rituals. Best of all, the Dots cart their entire catalog of over 40 full-length releases, making quite a scene at the merch table. This can be a real coup, as their work is very hard to find locally — kudos as always to Vinal Edge for keeping the faith. The Dots have also (finally) succumbed to the magic of the Internet, and even have a MySpace page, so it’s never been easier to dive into the most surreal world ever laid down on recordings. Don’t miss this wonderful, brain-damaging art.

Wanna trying classifying them? Be our guest. Photo from StarWars.com (no, seriously).

Bringing with them a heavy dose of psychedelia, synth-pop, industrial, ambient and any one of a dozen more musical avant-garde “isms,” the Legendary Pink Dots turned the Bluebird Theater into Denver’s own version of Amsterdam’s world-famous venue/museum/cultural mecca, The Melkweg, for a few hours Tuesday night. And, much to the delight of an unfortunately small crowd, bandleader Edward Ka-Spel led the five-peace through a fantastic, albeit somewhat short, journey through their hugely prolific history.

In case you’re among the uninitiated, the Legendary Pink Dots are a vastly multi-faceted band that started in 1980 in Britain and quickly moved themselves to Amsterdam. The move was fitting, as the general mood in Amsterdam arguably seemed to offer a more appropriate culture from which the band has pulled its music. To call the band’s style psychedelic, industrial, avant-garde, goth rock or ambient would not be wrong, and the band has been described all of those ways many times in the past two and a half decades. But any of those descriptions, and many combinations of them, wouldn’t be entirely right, either.

The Dots are artists of such a prolific nature that it proves difficult to classify them under any of these headings for long, and by “for long,” I mean even within the confines of one album, or, as was exhibited very well on Tuesday, within one show.

In under two hours, Ka-Spel and band members Phil Knight (synthesizer wizard), Martijn de Kleer (bass and guitar), Niels van Hoorn (saxophones) and Raymond Steeg (sound board wizard) pulled the audience through a musical journey that exhibited a wide range of styles. Accompanied only by electronic drums, the songs averaged somewhere between five and twelve minutes long.

Their set list at times channeled a combination of synth and punk, reminiscent of Test Dept. and early Stranglers (Ka-Spel often seemed to sing with an uncannily similar croon to Hugh Cornwell’s). Then they mixed in songs influenced by avant-garde bands like Public Image Limited (more from the “Second Edition” and “Flowers of Romance” era) and the Bevis Frond, soaked with a repetitive rhythm that resurrected legendary noise and industrial bands like Eisturzende Neubauten and Crash Worship. On top of all that, a few more tunes were thrown in that had an unmistakeable taste of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd or “Lucy in the Sky…” era Beatles.

While denying any of us a single genre on which to focus, the Dots provided the audience with an exciting set, along with just a touch of history. Songs included “No Matter What You Do,” “I Love You In Your Tragic Beauty,” “Just A Lifetime” and “Princess Coldheart,” among others.

One highlight came as van Hoorn, bald and adorned in a fantastic op-art printed suit, traveled through the audience from the stage clear to the front lobby, playing his saxophone with a light fixture attached to the bell. As he coaxed various screeches, groans, squeaks and squeals out of his horn, the light fixture would shine and increase in intensity with sound, lighting up audience members’ faces. A fan in the front later offered van Hoorn his similarly-colored hat to wear on stage for a few tunes.

And I’ll never forget Ka-Spel, barefoot and draped in a black robe and pink scarf, stomping emphatically back and forth across the stage during “No Matter What You Do,” screaming “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!” over and over again with a squeal somewhere between Ozzy Osbourne and John Lydon. The words were screamed out across the audience with a powerful mix of fear and rage, certain to burn a vision of Ka-Spel’s twisted face into many a cornea.

The Legendary Pink Dots maintain a devoted fan base that some might even say borders on cult-like. The band’s tremendously prolific artistic output and influence speaks for itself, and their discography consists of more than 40 records. Ka-Spel also has a considerable number of records to his name alone, and the band has collaborated in the past with bands like the Tear Garden (with members of Skinny Puppy) and Mimir (with Jim O-Rourke and others).

Though the band members’ ages are evident, they showed Tuesday night that they have no intention of slowing down, and their devoted fans seemed to be ecstatic for the news.

Billy Thieme is a Denver writer and regular Reverb contributor.

The origin of the Legendary Pink Dots reads like some mythical tale: Three people staying in separate tents at Stonehenge get up at the same time in the middle of night and walk through a mist, where they see a band playing. The mysterious musicians are so completely enthralled by the music they’re making that they’re oblivious to their impromptu audience of three. Within a week, the trio goes on to form the Legendary Pink Dots. That was nearly three decades ago, and founders Edward Ka-Spel and Phil “the Silverman” Knight went on to put out a slew of albums, including their latest — and finest, Plutonium Blonde, drawing from the psychedelia of early Pink Floyd and the krautrock of Can. We caught up with Ka-Spel at his home in the Netherlands and asked about the new album.

Westword: How do you feel about the way Plutonium Blonde turned out?

Edward Ka-Spel: I feel totally happy about this one. We took a long time on this one, particularly. This time we just sat down and said, “Look, we really should take the time that an album needs.” Sometimes we have the feeling that, I don’t know, we let deadlines and things, sort of, in a way, curtail us during the whole way that we wanted to go. It’s not that I’m saying that we really cut corners, but sometimes the pressure of, you know, staying alive, basically, maybe, made us finish albums faster than we would have. But on this one, no. This just takes really as long as it takes. This was going to be our perfect album, basically. We’re going to take a year to do it, at least. Of course, when you’ve actually finished it, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve taken or how much of a perfectionist you were, you always hear things like, “Oh, we should’ve done it a bit differently.” At least we did, in a sense, keep satisfaction within the band, I thought, with this one. I guess after all these albums, that’s pleasing enough, because we’ve made a hell of a lot of albums.

You and Phil are credited as playing devices on the new album. What sort of devices?

You’ve got to see Phil’s living room to understand just how many devices there are lying around. Lots of them are acoustic and some electronic things. Some things we don’t actually want to talk about because, for one, this is a new way of getting a very interesting sound, and we kind of don’t want other people doing it. It might sound a bit selfish there, but we found some very interesting little techniques on this album that got us jumping around like little kids at Christmas because of the sounds were getting out of them. To be honest, this technology is so primitive. It’s like you should be sort of waving a club around and throwing rocks. That’s as far as I can really say about it.

In their 26-year career, the Legendary Pink Dots have tackled everything from sinister electro-pop to psychedelic jam to industrial rock to pure sound collage experimentalism. Their newest studio album incorporates a little of all of the above, but following in the footsteps of 2006’s Your Children Placate You from Premature Graves, it goes at things from a fairly understated perspective, more thoughtful meditation than freak-out session. Several songs even border on folk, with The Silverman’s synthesizers providing textures so unassuming you barely realize they’re there.

On A World with No Mirrors, vocalist Edward Ka-Spel sings wistfully over Martijn de Kleer’s delicate guitars and Niels van Hoorn’s soft flutes, and Mailman is a deceptively sweet number delivered over plucked banjos and van Hoorn’s playful clarinet honks. Despite the seeming softness – even pleasantness – of many of the songs on Plutonium Blonde, Ka-Spel’s subtle lyricism imbues them with the guarded, wry cynicism of modernity that has become something of a signature. My First Zonee in particular bounces ebulliently along in praise of mobile communication equipment, but the real message of the song is what’s left out, a sense of loneliness and disconnection that makes the song’s perky pacing and sing-song vocals seem all the more forced. An Arm and a Leg, though still imbued with a certain irony, is more overtly dark, Ka-Spel delivering a sinister sort of sales pitch over wavering theremin, nervous piano chords, and treated tape loops.

On album closer Cubic Caesar, the band really comes out in force, each member’s specialty taking a starring role, with de Kleer’s electric guitar jamming over clanking electronics and van Hoorn’s moody woodwind atmosphere, all held together in a sort of half-dream state that’s less enlightening than soporific, making a perfect backdrop for Ka-Spel’s visionary soliloquy of proles tranquilized by mass-market virtual reality entertainment. “Oh me, oh my,” he sings, “I watch paint dry.” It’s a fitting coda to an album that’s in many ways the opposite of mass-marketed entertainment. With Plutonium Blonde, Ka-Spel and company are, as always, both eerily prescient and endlessly fascinating.

More than once this year, we’ve seen some of the great bands of our era quit trying to reinvent themselves and simply focus on playing to their strengths—those same strengths that built their substantial audiences in the first place. R.E.M.’s Accelerate is an incredible little return to the energy and the pace that defined them in the ‘80s, delivered with the benefit of wisdom, while Metallica has gone back to good, old-fashioned thrashing in a way not seen since perhaps …And Justice for All. In the age of instant access and availability, it’s almost pointless for a band to reinvent itself for any reason other than boredom. Pretty much every permutation and mutation of every style or combination of styles has been done at this point, and a band that tries to stretch itself into realms of sound that have already been explored by someone else is, more often than not, bound to sound outclassed. Sure, there are exceptions, any number of which we could immediately name, but the truth is, a band’s experimentation simply isn’t going to open up a certain fanbase to a new genre the way it once did.

In this way, perhaps, the Legendary Pink Dots would seem to be ahead of their time.

It’s not that they’ve never expanded their boundaries—on the contrary, they’ve dabbled in industrial noise, pure folk, synth-pop, and everything in between—rather, the seasoned Pink Dots listener always has a pretty accurate idea of what to expect when putting on a new album for the first time. Of course, when you’re talking about a band that’s putting out its 26th album, one must assume that they’ve pretty much ceded the capacity for surprise at this point.

As such, it would be easy to say that Plutonium Blonde is very much what you would expect from a Legendary Pink Dots release. It’s heavy on psychedelic swirls and whooshes; it’s largely subdued and thoughtful; Edward Ka-Spel puts his trademarked lisp to use in sinister, mournful, and satirical ways; and it’s easy to be swept away. In this way, Plutonium Blonde is an utter success, in that it represents the sound of the Legendary Pink Dots in every conceivable way, and it does so with the strength and conviction necessary to take one or two steps out of the band’s own predefined box. Taken outside such a reflexive context, however, there are some issues to take with the Dots’ latest.

For one, while the sound may remain consistent, the delivery isn’t always as graceful as it has been in the past. Opener “Torchsong” is a seven-minute trudge through scraping knives and buzzing synths, a torturously dark piece that speaks very little of the quiet contemplation to follow it. Ka-Spel’s nearly rapped spoken word almost saves the piece, but it’s simply too dank and lasts too long to inspire any sort of confidence in the album. “My First Zonee” might be a smirking take on our antisocial obsession with technologically-based trinkets, but the tone of the song is a little bit too precious to be taken seriously. Sure, it wouldn’t be a Pink Dots song without a few hints of darkness seeping through, and they do, but it’s just a little too cutely delivered to carry any sort of lasting appeal. Similar sentiments could be said for the short and slightly too sweet “Mailman”, whose banjo simply sounds out of place. As a standalone entry on a mix tape or as part of a compilation, it could shine, but on an album so steeped in acid wash, it’s merely a sore thumb.

The strengths of Plutonium Blonde lie in the quiet moments, the moments where Ka-Spel and company can choose to fill the empty spaces with sound or silence, with words or the unsaid. “Oceans Blue” is one of the most beautiful pieces of music the Dots have ever put to tape, consisting largely of periodic synth chords over the sound of an idling vehicle of some sort. Ka-Spel offers “Do you read me loud and clear? / The sea sings sweetly in my ear” over this backdrop, as we’re lulled into complacency just enough to be startled every time the calm is cruelly ripped away. “An Arm and a Leg” is just the sort of cacophonous spoken word that the Dots are likely to stretch into a 20-minute live masterpiece, and “Rainbows Too?”, which may or may not be a sequel of sorts to the Tear Garden (Ka-Spel’s collaboration with Skinny Puppy’s cEvin Key and Dwayne Goettel) classic “You and Me and Rainbows”, shines for its ten-minute duration with Key-esque synth work and a beautiful break highlighting the underrated Niels Van Hoornblower’s saxophone.

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the otherworldly closer that is “Cubic Caesar”, whose synths recall the Nintendo classic Metroid and whose words convey utter boredom and personal stasis. “I watch paint dry”, Ka-Spel sings, and you hear a man broken, an off-kilter, heartbreaking rumination on regret told in right angles and electronic clicks.

Such is the majesty of the Legendary Pink Dots—while there is no prescribed formula to their work, what they deliver always sounds like themselves. While Plutonium Blonde may falter in places, it’s no different. This is the Pink Dots through and through, and whether you take to it may well depend entirely on whether you’ve taken to them before. Those who have will find treasure to be uncovered; those who have not may well find an impenetrable wall of obscurity.

Legendary Pink Dots are loopy as oompah-loompahs and as tough to choke down as lard-lumped oatmeal when they let their deepest eccentricities shine through. Keep your eyes fixed, however, and you’ll catch the infinite possibilities of an unbridled mind right in the eye. Most exciting about the Dots is how much material there is to sift through starting with 1981’s Dots on the Eyes, and most of it’s relatively hard to find/download for folks like me who don’t possess a decent record store/OiNK replacement.

Plutonium Blonde works perfectly as a link in an endless chain of pop ignorance, where outside trends are as unimportant as song structure and restraint. LPD’s principal members Edward Ka-Spell and Silver Man are prone to whipping out moves you don’t expect, plucking on a banjo one minute and manipulating a tape loop the next. Common as that seems with today’s indie wunderkinds dipping into all sorts of instruments and influences, Legendary Pink Dots have been doing this for much longer and have suffered because of it. Despite their seething, rabid cult following, the Dots don’t do commerce. You can probably count the number of LPD fans in your town on one hand, yet when you add it all up, what you get are a few rare expensive records and a whole pile of ignored music.

Maybe that’s what makes it so exciting to find so much life still blooming on each successive recording. Legendary Pink Dots, like so many others, create while few are watching and have the time of their lives. It’s impossible not to join in on the merriment. Spinning their LPs, especially Blonde, is more like sitting through a surreal Dr. Who movie than sitting through a typical record. You get a lot of accent-heavy voiceover narrative, strange synth sounds, cheesiness, to be sure, and a generally clinical feel throughout.

That said, I’m totally on board. Bands like Legendary Pink Dots don’t come along too often. Witness the surreal tribal dink-and-dunk percussion, the whimsical segues from one track to the next, the deep, dank moods that will shift your shit (one way or another), the Wall-esque narratives that barely make sense yet compel, the keyboard phrases that sound scraped from the floor of the final warehouse scene from the original Terminator movie. Indeed, the depth of the insanity brought to the table here is not for the faint of Floyd.
1. Torchsong
2. Rainbows Too?
3. A World With No Mirrors
4. My First Zonee
5. Faded Photograph
6. An Arm And A Leg
7. Mailman
8. Oceans Blue
9. Savannah Red
10. Cubic Caesar

by Gumshoe