Review source: The Quietus

Over 33 years and 40-plus albums, the Legendary Pink Dots have forged a unique, subterranean path through a cross-section of British, European and American musical subcultures. With roots in the same fertile soil of English 1980s post-punk, post-hippie, acid-informed occultism as Psychic TV, Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound – equal parts Stonehenge Free Festival and Ballardian industrial estate dystopia – they’ve detoured through goth, industrial, ambient and dark folk along their journey, from lo-fi tape experiments to alternative dancefloor fillers, subversive pop to abrasive noise, often within the same song.

If anything, though, the Dots can be seen as a singular development of the underground psychedelia that first inspired main man Edward Ka-Spel (born 1954) as a teenager: Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the alien visitations of early David Bowie, the art-rock of Henry Cow and the Residents, and of course the first wave of German kosmische music – Can, Faust, Neu! These early visions of artistic freedom have informed the band ever since, through changing incarnations built around Ka-Spel and founding keyboard player Phil Knight, aka The Silverman. Alongside a complex, somewhat tongue-in-cheek mythology constructed via their lyrics and presentation, this approach has seen the Dots filed away as the cult bands’ cult band – beloved of a hardcore few, quietly influential yet perpetually existing well beneath the media radar.

Since the mid-90s the band have been somewhat better known in America where, partly due to their association with Canadian pioneers Skinny Puppy, they’re considered a part of the industrial scene and embraced accordingly. They were even courted by Blondie producer Craig Leon and Van Halen producer Ted Templeman, opportunities they missed out on not due to any stubborn refusal to compromise their ideals, but due to an endearing absent-mindedness; they basically forgot to return their calls. So it is that the latest Dots release comes not courtesy of Time Warner but Pennsylvania’s more modest Metropolis Records. And for a band long based in the Netherlands, and focusing much of its activity in America, it is an inescapably English record, concerned with our heritage and history, our current dire predicament, our blinkered island outlook and, perhaps, our potential for change and liberation.

An accessible and ambitious album, The Gethsemane Option still retains the main stumbling block for any casual listener coming to the Legendary Pink Dots – Edward Ka-Spel’s voice. It’s a flat, nasal drone, part lisp and part sneer, high-pitched and slightly camp, and unapologetically emphasising an East London-Essex-Suffolk accent. It’s a voice not dissimilar to the vocals of Genesis P-Orridge, Current 93’s David Tibet, and Alternative TV’s Mark Perry, making it the default non-singing voice of the Southern English, Post-Punk Occult Underground. And, unfortunately, in the uninitiated it can easily evoke images of Peter Cook as EL Wisty, dressed in cloak and pointy hat, earnestly insisting that he’s been ‘aving a dabble in the black arts, and investigating the works of Aleister Crowley, and it’s all very interesting actually… But the strange thing is that, as you persevere, Ka-Spel’s initially comical vocals become the very glue that holds the album together, and grow in emotional power with every listen. Soon you wouldn’t have them any other way.

Opening track ‘A Star Is Born’ rides in on sinister, unnerving washes of synthesiser that suggest some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem – or Balham – to be spawned, and this is a nativity tale of sorts, relocated to a “shabby flat in nowhere town, made glorious tonight.” A special child comes into this world certainly, but whether Christ or Antichrist or half-baked homunculus is unclear, as is whether Ka-Spel’s pronouncement that “this is Holy Magick in a cool, cruel world” should be taken sincerely at face value – or whether, as his trademark sneer suggests, the protagonists of the song, hoping for better days and a swift rise from powerless misery to some higher status, are to be both pitied and feared. Whatever, electronic percussion chatters like a horde of cockroaches emerging from behind the skirting board to pay their respects, and the atmosphere curdles into some hybrid of Eraserhead and Rosemary’s Baby as imagined by Czech puppet master Jan Švankmajer.

‘The Garden of Ealing’ is an expert evocations of all the vague, romantic notions of England’s lost golden age, opening with cross-faded snatches of music hall comedy and a Radio 4 type voice reminding us that “we are just a small island.” The song itself could easily be the work of Momus, or an especially melancholic Pet Shop Boys, bedevilled by slashing, rust-flaking electric guitars courtesy of Eric Dorst, echoing down abandoned tube lines as up above the London traffic winks through the falling drizzle. Like a Graham Greene novella, it meditates movingly on the reassuring fantasies of an expat exile, fearful and threatened by the unfamiliar modern world and feeling “invisible, like a ha’penny in a drawer in an attic stored, for rainy days that never come.” He retreats to within the comforting lines drawn in black-and-white by a 1940s comedy feature. “Trying to laugh it off… it takes away the fear that history has ended, that the vestiges of everything I cherish have subsided…”

However, we should never allow fear of the new and unknown to push us into retreat, especially when that retreat is disguised as progress. ‘Esher Everywhere’ begins as a lament for a world homogenised by cultural imperialism, but Ka-Spel’s tone is at first ambiguous; his calls to “turn off the box” and “remove the locks from your windows” might suggest that he approves of this flat-packed New Jerusalem. The clue should have come with the line “they’re sweeping up the debris” however, and the recordings of the 2011 London riots that follow his call to “step outside and breathe the air” suggest that all is not well in this suburban Eden. And when he sings “we’re all in this together, in a place that we can share – our Big Society; let’s call it Esher Everywhere…” it becomes clear just whose flawed vision Ka-Spel is describing, and that the limits of this glorious freedom are sharply circumscribed for most.

Ka-Spel could well have Cameron in mind too on ‘Pendulum,’ intoning “there is no place for small mercies in your sterilised universe” over droning, Cluster-like ambience. But the suggestion is there in the title that things will swing back again. “Your truth… it’s drawn with a stick in the sand, as the desert wind rages and covers your hands. Blameless once more, in the end, just a man.” The pulsing machine skank of ‘Grey Scale’ recognises the small compromises with the system we all make; gradual steps towards total surrender and a life lived in abject fear. “We know where you’re hiding”, mocks a sing-song voice towards the end. Better to follow the heavy, striding bassline of mathematical-occult essay ‘One More Dimension’ as it traverses landscapes of strangely pastoral electronica, before giving way to the sound of a loudly creaking floorboard, or swinging door – suggesting that the way into a different space, another way of being, is right there in front of us, but hidden just out of sight.

HOUSTON PRESS

Aliens Welcome: A Playlist for World UFO Day

by Jef With One F

THE SILVERMAN – TIME ON THIN ICE (CD by Beta Lactam-ring Records)
This might actually a bit older than the usual very fresh and very recent releases Vital Weekly usually deals with, but upon his recent visit to the VWHQ The Silverman left me this, along with a copy of the latest CD by The Legendary Pink Dots, which I thought saw them back in fine form.

Sometimes I tend to think of Silverman releases as blue prints for future Pink Dots releases, but I guess that’s not true, as they stand very much by their own. The four long pieces here show a side to The Silverman which we hardly see in the work he does with the Pink Dots. Spacey, atmospheric music, build from synthesizers. That made me think about something: when do we classify something as drone music and when is something cosmic music? With the current interest in the latter, I think The Silverman could the master of the scene. Should be. His love of analogue synthesizers, textured sounds and slow arpeggio’s, along with sparse percussion make up some excellent cosmic trip, which also finds its >roots in drone music (say Eliane Radigue) and modern electronics.

Now why isn’t this guy on a hip young label playing is electronic spacey music? If ever I would find out… Here The Silverman gets vocal contributions on two pieces, but the best is ‘Ocean Calling’, which is all by himself: a meditative piece of music, reflecting tidal waves, slowly moving back and forward. Four excellent pieces of the greatest mood music. (FdW)
Address: http://www.blrrecords.com

There comes a time in every band’s life when the sound “matures.” The members come back from a year in Tibet or wherever and learn to settle their creative conflicts like civilized people, and the beats are slower, there’s way less bass, and the singer goes a little flat. Of course the writing is more sophisticated, the song construction is more interesting, the lyrics are more subtle, but it’s hard not to feel like the band has lost their teeth.

That’s until the band releases the album that “gets back to their roots.” Often it’s a forced imitation of the band’s earlier sounds that filled stadiums and saturated radio waves. But once in awhile, a band truly rediscovers the old energy and revitalizes their mature sound. For The Legendary Pink Dots, that album is Plutonium Blonde.

From the electric nightmares Torch Song and Faded Photograph, to the airy prog of A World With No Mirrors, to the country lullaby Mailman, this is the wildly inventive LPD at the height of their powers. The requisite spoken-word psychodrama An Arm and a Leg has vocalist Ka-Spel at his most disturbing, with minimal reliance on electronic distortion. Other tracks cull stylings from every period of the band’s hugely varied nigh-on-30 year history. If you were ever a fan of the Dots, buy this album. If you’ve never heard of the Dots, this is an excellent place to start.

It’s always amazing and refreshing to see an audience as fervent for its minstrels as Houston is for the Legendary Pink Dots. There are no hangers-back — as soon as the band quietly makes its way onto the stage, there is a Jonestown-like lemming march to the front, every set of eyes are turned up in rapture.

Sadly, the audience has steadily dwindled over the years, and seems only half of what it was five years ago. It would be a damn shame if Houston were to be marked off of the itinerary of one of the truly independent and original groups of musicians in the world.

The Dots’ stage presence alone is stirring, woodwind guru Niels Van Hoornblower in his stylish diamond suit, guitarist Martijn DeKleer in his hitchhiking-through-Europe uniform, keyboardist Silverman looking like an aging professional wrestler with his Pebbles Flintstone haircut and, of course, singer Edward Ka-Spel barefoot in his robe, scarf and sunglasses.

The band never asks if you’re ready to rock. You’re not ready, anyway. From the first moment Ka-Spel’s sinister pseudo-tenor waltzes out of the speakers, it becomes apparent just how unprepared an audience is for the forthcoming willing rape of the mind.

The four Dots’ interplay is highly enjoyable, reminiscent of live Doors footage and the shamanistic tradition of shared experience and rhythm. They are very careful, though, not to take it too seriously. Niels, the ultimate multi-instrumentalist playing flute, clarinet, and an electronic wind instrument that looks like God’s bong, shows his playfully attacked each member of the band and audience with his flashlight saxophone during “No Matter What You Do.”

That song, by the by, explores how Jesus loves the little woodland creatures and the children who occasionally set fire to them. After the song, Ka-Spel leans casually over the mike and wonders aloud whether the subject of the song will come up at Judgement Day. Well, Jesus may have walked on water, but I’ve seen Ka-Spel walk barefoot across a dirty street strewn with broken glass and discarded needles on the way to a Chinese buffet. Obviously, he’s some kind of prophet (or a lunatic, probably both).

One of the evening’s true pleasures was Martijn DeKleer. I’ve never really focused on him before, but I’ve never seen “The Grain Kings” played live before, either. One of the most awesome tracks from one of the Dots’ most awesome albums (The Maria Dimension), the eight-minute song found DeKleer thoroughly thrashing his guitar in a way you just don’t seem to see at a Dots show very often.

Usually the most understated and laid-back band member onstage, he really comes alive when it’s his turn, and even the other three members of the band stared at him as he made the sound system beg for mercy. All of this without a single change of expression.

The evening drew to a close with the Dots’ encore, “Princess Coldheart,” and the band left the stage to the sounds of the audience picking up the song’s choir vocals at the end. If there is anything to be said about a Dots show, it’s that the people involved, both band and audience, are firm believers in the Legendary Pink Premise: Sing while we may

Legendary Pink Dots proved themselves undeniably legendary last week at Knitting Factory. Not in need of an opening band to get the crowd pumped, darkly clad fans, of all ages, packed into the Main Space to eagerly await their beloved Dots, who formed twenty-eight years ago in 1980. In the same league as Syd Barrett, with whom he is often compared, Dots vocalist Edward Ka-Spel (also known as Prophet Qa-Spel, Qa’Sepel, Che Banana, and D’Archangel) guided his band’s spacey, goth-folkloric sound to concoct a neo-mythology, lulling the crowd into a hypnotic trance. Wearing a long black tunic, purple scarf, and round sunglasses, Ka-Spel performed like an avant-garde Ozzy Osbourne, uttering ghostly lyrics during moments of eerie calm, and emitting a scream or a whimper during those of wild intensity.

The band itself was furiously alive and entertaining, and together the five-piece created a sort of time warp⎯we were back in the artsy Liquid Sky eighties, or on a spaceship miles away, or inside of a surreal painting or new wave film, or in a cemetery awaking the dead, conducting a séance, or taking part in a Pagan ceremony à la Wickerman. But the show was not a total pre-Hallow’s Eve spookfest; it was also full of light-hearted fun! Niels Van Hoorn, who joined the band in 1988, performed all wind instruments (sax, flute, clarinet, some other gadgets) and was the most dynamic Dot. Wearing a funky diamond-patterned suit, he affixed a light beam onto his saxophone, which brightened as he blew into the instrument. He meandered through the crowd during two songs, aiming his sax at fans, illuminating faces, and getting the girls to seductively sway.

The Dots played for over two hours, performing two encores of older songs, and incorporating songs from the new album, Plutonium Blonde, into their main set. The highlight of the show was the performance of “Torchsong,” the first track on Plutonium, which they played as the last song before the encore. The extended live version of this 7-minute song was all the more mind-blowing; revolving noises, synths, and samples swelled into the small room, overwhelming the senses and divulging a dark psychedelic landscape, Ka-Spel half-whispering sinister lyrics and gesturing like Dr. Caligari. At the merch table, which offered an insanely large selection of CDs (they have released more than 40, not counting solo work), records, t-shirts, pins, and artwork, the Dots signed for free and mingled with fans. What could have been a distant experience fully turned into a friendly gathering, until it was time to button up and catch the subway.

words by Amy Dupcak