Psychedelic/Experimental: Every song on here is worthwhile, and the range of moods is wide. Edward Ka-Spel’s British-accented vocals alternate from eeriness as though echoing through a tube (1 and especially 6 where he narrates in a Rod Serling-like way), to playfulness on 4 (a song about texting) and 7 (where a banjo adds to the innocence). Track 3 has an acoustic folk feel, while Track 9 has a tropical element to it and is purely instrumental with its jungle percussion, while Track 10 is haunting and depressing with its lyrical content about a virtual world of lonesomeness. Track 10 is perhaps the most epic of the tracks in its simulation of water sounds and outboard motors whirring with minimal keys and synths and chanting lyrics. It’s like a dramatic plunge into the deep. Enjoy.

Posted: Friday, September 12, 2008
By: Matthew Johnson
Assistant Editor

The latest album from the psychedelic industrial masters is a tense but understated exploration of disconnection and ennui in the modern age.

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.

I know a guy who keeps a spare shelf in his vast (and believe me, it’s vast, like as in needing three a’s—vaaast) music library for the Legendary Pink Dots. The gatefold vinyl album versions are prominently displayed. The compact discs stack. The small pocket hard drive where they’ve all been downloaded for international travel sits with a big sticker. There are bootlegs there. There are live versions.

The band is his rock identity—obsessive, complete, and absolutely true.

I myself don’t have a rock identity, but as I listen to Plutonium Blonde, the newest output from the band—who has many releases—I imagine what it’s like there. This as a rock identity seems strange. The first track is a chanting, Eastern-themed haunt titled “Torchsong,” which exists quite outside the standard song, filed under rock. Even goth rock—it’s just so off-kilter. It’s simply one of the most sinister songs I’ve ever heard, and at that, I’ve listened to it three times or more just processing its gaudy specter. All over the board goes Plutonium Blonde, from sax undertones (“A World With No Mirrors” and “My First Zonee”) to dingy Portishead (“Faded Photograph”) to radio narrative-cum-industrial (“An Arm And A Leg”). All over it goes, and as a listener relatively new to the Legendary Pink Dots, everywhere they go, I will follow. There isn’t a bad song in the ten.

If I could count any one thing as a quibble with Plutonium Blonde, it is that I didn’t make this band my band earlier. Knowing the people I know, however, it might not be too late.

Erick Mertz

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Legendary Pink Dots Bring Cosmic Apocalypse to the Cafe Du Nord in November

Wed Jul 30, 2008 at 03:20:23 PM

European cult rockers the Legendary Pink Dots have announced two dates in San Francisco, November 14-15 at the Cafe Du Nord. For those uninitiated into the Dots’ odd world, imagine a man vaguely reminiscent of Dr. Who reeling off eccentric sing-song melodies that sound whimsical and innocent — until you discover the bloody menace lurking underneath. Meanwhile the band behind him unrolls climbing sheets of sound that envelop elements of psychedelic rock, goth, dub, ambient jazz, and analog electronic noise. It’s what might happen if a lysergic hippie tea party took a disastrous turn for the worse. Anyway, the already converted or the merely curious can buy advance tickets for $17 at the Cafe Du Nord website. — J. Graham

The Legendary Pink Dots’ refusal to sit comfortably within any category scares major record labels. You can’t even define them by what they’re not, as they straddle Krautrock, psych, punk and electronica; and they’re all of these things and more, spread across this superbly produced 5-LP box set covering the Dots’ early recordings, with the emphasis on electro-pop experimentation. There are plenty of tangential explorations as well, and the whole features startling fully-formed gems and “nearlies” that were all originally put out on cassette across 1980-82. There’s also a batch of live recordings from Cologne, 1983.

****

Vinyl On Demand | VOD 48
Reviewed by Paul Rigby