Legendary Pink Dots Limelight 660 Avenue of the Americas, at 20th Street Manhattan

Every few years since the late 1960’s, arty rock has fallen out of fashion, only to be revived by the next coterie of earnest literary types. The Legendary Pink Dots, an English band now based in the Netherlands, hold onto the old art-rock impulse; they definitely know the meaning of the word “pre-Raphaelite.”

On Tuesday night, the band dispensed sustained keyboard chords, haunted-house saxophone sounds, vocals that moved from weedy meditations to mad-scientist shrieks and lyrics about Jack the Ripper’s death, “Princess Coldheart” or the sinking of the Titanic: “You never know what you might run into,” Edward Ka-Spel intoned.

Most of the songs used only a subdued rhythm — a quiet tick-tock, the click of metal sticks — until the end of the set, when the band finally let loose a full-fledged electronic dance beat. The tone was spooky and hushed, the better to contemplate the nursery-rhyme melodies and Mr. Ka-Spel’s imagistic lyrics. Amid its two-chord reveries, the band also tried touches of music hall, recalling Genesis in the early 1970’s.

Mr. Ka-Spel, wearing a hooded vinyl cape that looked like a monk’s cassock, acted like a classic English eccentric, singing with slow-motion gestures or pouncing on his synthesizer keyboard like Quasimodo; at one point, he brought out a puppet and cackled over it. What saves the band from pretension is that Mr. Ka-Spel isn’t entirely somber — he has a twinkle behind his spectacles — and that like their best art-rock forebears, the songs often capture an elusive, ominous sense of whimsy.

By JON PARELES
Published: July 18, 1991

Floating in with the perfectly titled ominous synth groans of “Black Zone,” The Tower finds the Legendary Pink Dots really starting to gel as a conceptual effort all around, with increasingly involved arrangements and all the more harrowing performances. The Tower is in many ways an album of striking moments suddenly surfacing in excellent songs — the violin parts on “Vigil-Anti,” the sudden keyboard sparkles on the drifting, building moodout “Poppy Day” — prettiness turned brutal at the stop of a dime. The use of hollow electronic percussion detracts a bit from the atmospheres the group tries to create, but the emphasis on the rhythms often comes courtesy of mostly keyboards and synth bass, suggesting waltzes and horror movie settings at the same time. Even when things get a bit chirpy on The Tower, it’s the chirpiness of dancing on a very, very narrow ledge above oblivion. A song like “Break Day” may start in cheery enough music-box fashion, but the combination of feedback and Ka-Spel‘s keening voice on the chorus makes for a simple but effective touch, a further punch on an endless downward spiral. His mock toff accent toward the end is a hilarious touch as well. Though not a concept album per se, Ka-Spel lyrically pursues the titular image through five sequentially named tracks throughout the album — “Tower 1,” “Tower 2,” etc. — an intriguing approach more groups would do well to embrace instead of simply trying to write bad opera. Of those tracks, “Tower 1” has some of the best parts, twinkling keyboards and Ka-Spel‘s overdubbed voice reciting names like a demented schoolteacher, while “Tower 4” is in many ways a tribute to late-70s Bowie, of all things. Nice cameo moment — Lilly Ak‘s lead vocal on “Astrid,” a fine contrast to Ka-Spel‘s usual approach which inadvertently invents most female goth vocalists’ approaches in the ’90s.

by Ned Raggett
(The date of this review is unknown)