Drop a Dot: The Legendary Pink Dots Round Out a Quarter Century
by Marjorie Skinner

You don’t really need the drugs. With over 25 releases available from cult geniuses the Legendary Pink Dots, all you need is a turntable and the desire to have your mind by turns kneaded into ponderous hypnosis and tricked down dripping halls of epic psychedelia. Not that a doobie won’t help you sink further into the wandering, goblin house of the Dots’ repertoire–the mix of machines employed in gothic atmosphere with retro pop ease is a true aural adventure into “eat me, drink me” country.

The career of the Legendary Pink Dots spans roughly a quarter century, during which time they steadily produced an astounding repertoire. Each record has its own mood and motives, but with the Dots you’re guaranteed to find yourself in a dreamlike place no matter what, one that all the bad trance DJs in the world could only pray to someday be able to cop.

Watching the development and experimentation of the band is much like watching an individual walk through 25 years of life. Phases pass and luck changes direction, which filters through to color a person’s–or a band’s–essential traits. In the case of the Legendary Pink Dots, those essentials are a propensity for appreciating the shadowy end of their subject matter, a fascination with technology and its developing relationship to art, and a loyalty to beauty in sound. No less impervious to the state of their environment than any other war-era artist, 2002’s All the King’s Men stood as a queasy reflection of world affairs on creative culture and the collective psyche.

Perhaps one of the aspects of the Dots’ ever-expanding popularity is their commitment to making music that is experimental and progressive yet counterbalanced by a desire to please the ear. Unlike other artists exploring similar realms, the Dots are rarely interested in undue cacophony, escaping the impression that they are foisting the raw results of their experiments and discoveries on their audience. Although fascinating and important, the experience of innovation without an awareness of your aesthetic can produce something that often rests more contentedly in the archives rather than spinning in your room when there’s company over. The Dots have managed to find the best in both worlds, leading their listeners through new audio spaces without neglecting the desire to keep the music palatable–sometimes even catchy.

Despite the many changes in lineup the band has experienced over its life span, the Legendary Pink Dots have retained their ringleader throughout. Edward Ka-Spel cuts one of the most enigmatic figures in modern music history. Known for his seemingly single-minded career directive of perfecting an impersonation of Syd Barrett, it’s his poetry that can be credited for much of the devotion of Dots fans. In addition, he’s also had a hand in projects like Skinny Puppy and the Tear Garden, as well as his own solo work.

On the most recent release from the Pink Dots, The Whispering Wall, the music is rolled back a bit to allow Ka-Spel’s half-spoken lyrics more of a platform. Delivered in a lazy, almost bemused, almost sinister, but rakish and likable tone, Ka-Spel’s poetry here is eerily infused with everyday references to details like the crackers an old girlfriend left behind, mixed with witchy, sing-song lines about weeping willow trees and bloody towels.

Meanwhile, the music itself leads you into absorption, remaining constant just enough to get the listener accustomed to one particular tack before veering into a new direction and snapping you newly awake. Stoned or not, the effect on the close appreciator is a sense of vague profundity, as if you’ve stumbled on some small piece of sagacious wisdom in a detail, which of course, with the right mindset, you sort of have.

Other aspects of the new album are reminiscent of being locked on the wrong side of the fence at a haunted carnival. It’s difficult to discern whether the ghosts are friendly or dangerous–a precarious line drawn in the sand of doom that the Legendary Pink Dots are pros at walking–but the frighteningly forced joviality of trumpeting parade music that breaks into songs such as “Dominic” certainly creates a spectral image.

The experience of a Legendary Pink Dots show is less about “rocking out,” and more of a ritualistic, communal, and mental solstice. Maybe an excuse to get high, too.

The Legendary Pink Dots w/Bill Horist
Tues June 29, Chop Suey,
8 pm, $13 adv.

Euro gloom rockers LPD perform at the Mason Jar
(Think pink: The Legendary Pink Dots stay strange)
By Mike Warren
published: June 17, 2004

Just as the words colour and color don’t mean quite the same thing, there are no American analogues to Syd Barrett, XTC, Robyn Hitchcock, David Sylvian or the Legendary Pink Dots (acid reference almost certain). The Pink Dots emerged from England in 1980, moved to Amsterdam (legal cannabis influence almost certain) and began to release wild and weird album after album after album. Their music is post-prog experimental and offhandedly pop; the lyrics slink around corners like late-’60s English children’s books (there’s that doesn’t-quite-translate thing again), and the songs have tellingly interior titles: “Personal Monster,” “King of a Small World.” With songs that are equal parts Yaz and Yes synth lines, Jethro Tull flute and Buzzcocks guitars, this is a band that’s an anomaly, an artifact and a stalwart prediction of future sounds. They just probably won’t be American sounds.

Where: Mason Jar
Details: Scheduled to perform on Sunday, June 20

THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
The Whispering Wall (ROIR)
US release date: 18 May 2004
UK release date: 28 June 2004
by Richard T. Williams

Director Mel Stuart’s 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has gone down in history as a beloved family film, but most of its viewers are well aware of its slightly sinister qualities simmering beneath the shiny, colorful surface. In fact, Roald Dahl’s classic story, adapted for the film, descends directly from the British whimsy introduced in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and contains very little of the film’s latent darkness; while the novel also features the strict morality lessons that demonstrate fat boys being sucked up through tubes of liquid chocolate or boisterous girls inflating into giant blueberries, the post-’60s hippie hangover and psychedelic freak-out moments exclusive to the film are clearly identifiable elements of their time. In the film’s most impressionable segment, “The Wondrous Boat Ride” — in which the brilliant Gene Wilder intones a creepy poem about going, rowing, and hellfires glowing, while surprising and disturbing media images flash on the still black background behind him — viewers are assaulted with a sickening combination of fascination and fear, as they are forced to confront a sensual stimulation beyond their regular level of understanding. This is the kind of moment that the Legendary Pink Dots have been recreating on record for almost 25 years. The Whispering Wall, possibly their 21st proper studio album, often hints at the band’s tendency to throw the listener blindly into overwhelming (and truly rewarding, for the initiated) freak-out moments, but never quite goes there, leaving those with whetted appetites to pursue the more difficult moments into the remainder of the Dots’ catalog.

Instead, The Whispering Wall captures the Dots at their most accessible and appealing. As a palatable entry point, it may leave long-time fans feeling that they’ve heard some of these exercises before, but new converts will admire the variety and breadth of sound on display here. The heavy guitar, funereal organ, and pounding drums in the strong “Soft Toy” mildly recall what once was by playing to expectations of the goth/industrial audience into which the band has been unfairly immersed for years, but the song effectively balances darkness and beauty as the band always have. “Dominic” offers the Tom Stoppard treatment to the tale of Humpty Dumpty, complete with a nursery rhyme chorus, while the similarly vaudevillian sing-along flavor of “Peek-a-Boo” has been successfully revisited several times throughout the Dots’ career. “In Sickness and in Health” is a precious ballad, predominant on later Dots records such as 2002’s All the King’s Horses, and is a fine example of the band’s ability to insert space amongst the usual chaos of the band’s principal players: wordsmith Edward Ka-Spel, synthesizer wizard Phil Knight, and reed maestro Niels van Hoorn. Finally, “No Walls, No Strings” is all space — soothing, ambient washes of ethereality to cleanse the palate before moving on to the next record, or rather replaying this one in an attempt to fully process it.

And repeated listening is a necessity with the Legendary Pink Dots. A dazzling but distracting array of approachable styles like this may deter a new ear from understanding the true reason why the sound of the band is never simple, even when it seems to be, or why the band would ever choose to approximate the sensation of that “wondrous boat ride” in sound. The aforementioned tradition of British whimsy is merely used as a starting point to hook the listener, a deliberate sugarcoating of the underlying electronic experimentalism of Kraut rock and early industrial music, as well as the skill-developing repetition and groove of progressive rock (“For Sale” is a shimmering example of the band’s proggiest elements on The Whispering Wall). Once the listener is hooked, the Dots’ constantly aspire to push the conventions of standard pop/rock and what kinds of sound the listener will allow within the limited context, and at times the results are off-putting. Yet, it is at these more experimental moments that the band truly succeeds. Such experimentalism has always been a fundamental part of both the band’s sound and songwriting, even throughout their early days of self-released cassettes featuring the lowest fidelity sound imaginable; but while other bands might diverge into passages of atmosphere and loose structure to compensate for a lack of real songs, the Legendary Pink Dots have honed their writing with its experimentalism intact for a quarter of a century. Thus, what feels like experimentalism on the surface (i.e., the noisy grind of “The Divide”, the gruelingly slow development of the intro to “In Sickness and in Health”, or the watery effects and echoes that act as the segue between “Sunken Pleasure” and “Rising Pleasure”) is actually the most integral aspect of the band’s sound — their raison d’etre. In contrast, most rock bands are content to build their songs upon guitar riffs; the real problem is that most listeners expect nothing more.

The Whispering Wall additionally benefits from the ROIR label’s extended distribution, as it is the first proper studio album by the Legendary Pink Dots to be readily available outside of mail-order and specialty stores in over a decade. (2002’s All the King’s Men is somewhat of an outtakes album.) New listeners beware, however; the intellectual stimulation of hardcore Dots records is addictive, and The Whispering Wall may act as a gateway drug into their world.

— 1 July 2004

Reviewed by DJ Johnson

I didn’t think too hard just now when I took a hell of a mind trip with The Legendary Pink Dots. I should have been paying attention to every word, I suppose, but it seemed to be more about the sounds they weave for the listener to float on. Exquisite sounds, from bell-like keyboards ringing in layers to cast-off sounds orbiting the space and coming back slightly altered, pockets of noise just loud enough to turn your head, colliding tails of reverb, and all wrapped around disturbingly beautiful melodies sung by Edward Ka-Spel. And there are words, but I keep forgetting to bring them into the conscious part of my mind, despite the pounding coming from my subconscious. Let’s see…

Oh my…

Who knew it was a Halloween album? “In Sickness and In Health” is just a tad disturbing (“There engraved upon my heart, your truth will linger when your ashes are just dust in my blind eye”) when you’re feeling happily high from the powerful psychedelic music. But then again, if you didn’t expect a little Outer Limits in your Inner Sanctum, you just don’t know your Dots, do you? Spread the word: the Legendary Pink Dots are still at it in 2004, and what’s more they’re at the top of their game.

© 2004 – DJ Johnson

(The precise date of this review is unknown.)

Legendary Pink Dots:
All the King’s Men [ROIR; 2002]
Rating: 7.0

You have to admire a band that just doesn’t care at all about fitting in with any current trend in music. Legendary Pink Dots have wedged themselves so firmly into their own specific niche over the years that it’s unlikely they could leave it even if they wanted to. In just over twenty years, they’ve kicked out nearly forty albums (live records and comps put them near sixty), and not one of those releases has ever seen them set foot into a realm you could call commercial. While obscurity and difficulty certainly aren’t virtues in their own right, the various lineups that have revolved around the core of Edward Ka-Spel and Phil Knight have always found oddness without much effort– some of their best records (From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By, A Perfect Mystery, Chemical Playground 1 + 2) revel in sounds that most would roll their eyes at.

And that’s an important point– most people will not like this music. That’s just fact. The keyboards drip in sounds other bands avoid like the plague, Ka-Spel’s lisping delivery can be over-the-top even for Goths, and huge swaths of this album are bathed with washes of sound that go places only when they feel like it, not when you want them to. The band’s closest kindred spirits in terms of approach (though not necessarily in sound), are darkwave acts like Current 93 and Nurse with Wound, though their music only occasionally reaches the points of creepy surrealism or abrasion that those artists aspire to.

And despite all this, there’s something arresting about the music that Legendary Pink Dots make. The band grabs you with a song or two, blinding you to the fact that you’re being gradually lowered into a morass of strange, uncompromising sound. In the midst of all this is the inescapable fact that Ka-Spel can’t pronounce the letter “r,” a fact which will either drive you up the wall or endear you to him. I have to say that after a brief period of adjustment way back in the day, I came to like his voice– it nicely suits the music.

It’s almost not worth getting into specifics about songs, as the whole record feels very much of a piece, from the weird synthetic opening to the droning club beat that guides the last thirteen minutes of its duration on “The Brightest Star”. Programmed drums and little whizzing noises serve as the bed for “Cross of Fire”, which is about as appropriate a bowshot as you could have for what comes after. Ka-Spel starts out at the back of the mix, before an army of buzzing devices lifts him on robot arms into the foreground. He still sounds like he’s standing 20 feet down the hall speaking into a megaphone, but he somehow comes out ahead, at least before a guitar processed beyond recognition guts everything and leaves behind the artificial organ and string motifs of “The Warden”.

“The Warden” is one of a handful of comparatively straightforward dirges that populate the wasteland of guitar and keyboard drone that fills the album’s middle. The drum machine is halfway between Enya and being switched off, the string patches are utterly fake and the tempo is molasses slow, but all of this, combined with Ka-Spel’s dreamy intonations and some wandering, Leslie-coated piano, makes for something utterly unique and fascinating. “Sabres at Dawn” is a broken-down carnival ride waiting to maim a child, while “Touched by the Midnight Sun” is disquietingly empty, plying only a few sparse drones and some water-like ambience behind Ka-Spel’s disembodied zombie sing-speak.

The aforementioned closer picks things up at the end, and though its dance beat is a strong one, it’s what’s going on around it that’s really interesting– these sounds conjure images of clubbers being ripped to tatters by knives, splattering a blender load of distortion and whirring helicopter synths all over everything. When it finally sputters to a halt after 13 minutes of punishment, you’ll be ready to come back into the light. It’s difficult to say exactly who will like this, aside from those already along for the Dots’ freakish ride, and saying, “you’ll either love it or hate it outright,” though probably true, isn’t very helpful. So let me say this: Legendary Pink Dots are a singular musical experience, and if that’s worth your money, have a fun trip.

– Joe Tangari, February 27, 2003

Link to original article at All Music Guide

If you usually picture the Legendary Pink Dots’ discography as a spectrum running from accessible song-based albums to demanding experimental records, then you would have to file Synesthesia toward that latter end of the line. Once described by Edward Ka-Spel as a companion to Chemical Playschool: Vols. 11, 12 & 13, Synesthesia is actually a lot less enticing or endearing than that three-CD box set of glorious hodgepodgeism. It also pales in comparison to All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men, the two “song” albums released later that same year. Thus surrounded, Synesthesia feels like a footnote. However, it is not particularly weak, simply a bit inconsistent. Its main flaw is the imbalance between the reluctantly handed-out songs at the beginning and end of the album, and the half-hour excursion into ambient abstraction that is the “Premonition 26″/”Premonition 28” sequence. Quietly disquieting as they are, these two segued tracks are nothing new in LPD’s canon, and they are definitely too long. In matters of experimental music, “Flashback” is much more successful with its creaking sounds and ghostly, ectoplasmic aural reminiscences. Song-wise, “Shining Path” and “The More It Stays the Same” are decent efforts, though not particularly remarkable. Synesthesia is far from being an essential LPD title. Historically, it is noteworthy for being the first album featuring the quartet lineup of Ka-Spel, the Silverman, Niels van Hoorn, and Martijn de Kleer, with Raymond Steeg in the control room.

(The date of this review is unknown.)