Two shows over the weekend delved into equal but opposite ends of the outer reaches of vivid, noisy and arty psychedelic rock, yielding vastly different and equally distinctive sounds.

On Halloween night I hid out in the balcony during the Deerhunter record release party for their third album, Microcastle. Times New Viking opened with a crackly, noise-afflicted pop dirge of brain-teasing hooks swimming in ugly but beautiful overdrive. Jay Reatard followed with a face full of hair-thrashing, shot-gun punk energy, playing a little longer than his typical 20-minute set, but not by too much.

From a smaller stage it’s much easier to get swept into the moment of sheer, cathartic punk rock release during Jay’s shows. But from the safety of my perch in the balcony high above Variety’s stage, Jay’s typically sped-up tirades did the songs a bit of a disservice. He peeled through dozens of songs, spanning his “solo” singles pre-Blood Visions all the way through his recent spate of Matador 7-inches, but he just couldn’t get through them fast enough. Songs like “Hammer I Miss You,” “My Shadow” and “Screaming Hand” were played so fast that the delivery felt cartoonish… Intense to be sure, but they could definitely benefit from a dose of Xanax.

Afterward, it took Pylon a minute to reach cruising altitude with opening song “Cool,” but they hit stride soon enough. The sparseness and dub-like tension in their pop/new wave pop arrangements gives the group both strength and a timeless sense of intrigue, which was made all the more intense following Jay Reatard’s spastic energy. or whatever that’s worth, a few youngsters within my earshot grumbled that Pylon went on for too long… but the rest of the steadily building crowd seemed no worse for the wear.

Deerhunter closed with a performance that empowered songs from Microcastle with a much greater punch than anything the record offers. “Cover Me (Slowly),” “Never Stops” and “Nothing Ever Happened” unfolded behind a stunning barrage of lights as each song transformed from elegant order into chaos; culminating in a massive, all-consuming drone. When the audience demanded more, the group obliged with a menacing “Lake Somerset” stomp that bled into a few other more recent songs before segueing back into the drone and putting a cap on a weird and sensory overloading Halloween night.

The following night I made my way over to The Earl to catch “an evening with the Legendary Pink Dots.” I always forget about the gothic appeal this group holds, until I’m confronted with their audiences… That and when the door guy asked, “what’s up with all the goths here tonight?”

It’s nothing more than a coincidence as far as I’m concerned; a byproduct of the Pink Dots pairings with the members of Skinny Puppy for the Tear Garden albums… That and Edward Ka-Spel does posses a certain dark and mystical quality that doesn’t fit easily anywhere else. But I still maintain that throwing around words like psychedelic, avant-garde, post-industrial folk, experimental and just plain weird are more fitting of the group’s sound and vision. It’s an age old dilemma that has followed the group since their inception in 1980, and it’s not a bad thing.

Over the last several years the group’s touring line-up has settled on Ka-Spel, Niels Van Hornblower (Saxophone and various other wind instruments, both familiar and alien), Martijn De Kleer (guitar/bass) and Phil “the Silverman” Knight (keyboards/knob-twisting).

The latter two tend to keep to themselves during shows. But while Ka-Spel sings his guts out and works through some intensely spiritual and psychological demons, Niels goes wild with reptilian dexterity. From the stage he blows his saxophone into people’s faces and sporadically leaves the stage to assault on-lookers with a horn that’s fitted with a blinding flashlight that seems to burn brighter with every skronk and horn blast. The paring of these two characters creates a powerful tension of wacky sincerity that balances equal parts deep, dark honesty and avant-garde comic relief.

Not many artists can pull off this kind of dynamic, and a small but dedicated crowd of on-lookers pressed hard against the stage and hung on every word, every noise and every note the group created. Their set leaned heavily on material from their most recent release, Plutonium Blonde, but, just as they always do, the Dots rattled off a few older numbers as well. With a catalogue that includes easily between 50 and 100 legitimate releases, it’s pointless to keep your fingers crossed and hope for anything specific. Some highlights during show at The Earl included a spot-on performance of “The Grain Kings” from The Maria Dimension, and “Fifteen Flies in the Marmalade” from Asylum.

The group was in strong form as they played for nearly two hours, and even cracked jokes about coming to American only to be confused by talk of Joe the Plumber on CNN. The Dots put on a show with intensity and a cerebral balance of rumbling noise, and a heart-wrenching strum over narratives that take you on a journey into the farthest reaches of inner space and drop you off right where they found you… Only slightly shaken by the group’s singular blend of psychedelic paranoia, melancholy and bliss all rolled into one brain-bending and mysterious sound.

Photos by Chad Radford

“We’ve made such advances…”

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, where enquiring minds want to know: how exactly does the new Legendary Pink Dots album measure up? Now that I’ve had more than a month to absorb it, will it ultimately help me recapture my love for the band, or am I ready to write them off entirely?

BLINDER

Unlike what the Dots have been doing for much of the last 10 years, Plutonium Blonde focuses first and foremost on studio craft, rather than attempting to reproduce their live sound on record. The best pieces, such as the opening “Torchsong,” the nostalgic “Faded Photograph,” and the chaotic “An Arm and a Leg” may not break any new ground, but the studio experimentalism conjures up an earlier direction once passed over rather than expanded upon; within the first five minutes of the sinister chopping of “Torchsong,” I feel I am listening to Shadow Weaver Part 3. With Ka-Spel declaring, “So much to kill for!”, the album opens on a darker note than anything the Dots have done previously. The electronic effects have the same sort of uber-digital, clean detail that has been all but missing from the band’s more recent organic forays. Considering that 1994’s 9 Lives to Wonder, as good as it is, truly marks the beginning of the Dots’ obsession with their live performance rather than their records, this emphasis on studio wizardry is a welcome development, even if the band remains entirely oblivious of recording trends and modern gimmickry.

BLANDER

That being said, I wish Ed and Phil would occasionally let Niels sit out for a few rounds. I respect his place in the band’s history but the throwback hippie sound of his horns in certain contexts still horribly irritates me. His work on the otherwise guitar-oriented “A World with No Mirrors” really isn’t terrible, but when coupled with Edward’s somewhat strangulated vocal performance, the track overemphasizes both the band’s dated approach to songwriting and the production constraints that have left the record sounding of slightly lower fidelity than just about anything the LPDs have recorded since The Golden Age (their golden age?).

This is a small gripe, though. The album really is remarkably better than anything the band has done in a decade. Its most common relative is probably Your Children Placate You from Premature Graves but other than perhaps the brief “My First Zonee,” it never really seems to be pandering specifically to children and girlfriends. “Zonee” is in fact quite weird. It’s the album’s “Crumbs on the Carpet,” or possibly “When Lenny Meets Lorca.” Overtly poppy and based on a major chord arpeggio, it exemplifies those moments when the Dots don’t seem to realize that they’ve mutated into aliens who are completely unaware that nobody on earth is truly clamoring for music like this.

BLENDER

Once again, the Dots have produced a record with a mind-bending variety of stylistic twists and turns, often within the same song. “Rainbows Too?”, which perhaps takes its name from the classic Tear Garden epic “You and Me and Rainbows,” has a nine-minute, three-part format that allows it to switch gears dramatically from a percolating pop song to a slow-pulsing, ambient space passage and back again. Although they’ve done this kind of thing before (“The Andromeda Suite,” for starters), the song is a strong and adventurous track that helps establish that the band might be back on course. Similarly, “A World with No Mirrors” drops into a dark ambient passage just as it starts to wind up, and “An Arm and a Leg” is a spoken spaz-out piece—like “The Saucers Are Coming,” but with the stoner rock jams reverting to bleepy electronic freak-outs that are more in line with Ka-Spel’s solo work.

BLUNDER

Despite its strengths, I’d go so far as to say Plutonium Blonde could possibly be the worst-sequenced album in the Dots’ long career. Once upon a time, they released nearly everything as a concept album, no matter how muddled or overlabored, or else they meticulously edited everything together to produce an ever-flowing suite of sometimes-disparate pieces. Here, they bother with neither, following epic synthscapes with odd, sappy folk experiments unfortunately carried over from the All the King’s Horses era. A simple playlist reshuffle can remedy the problem of the sequence but not the frustration it inflicts. As is, “A World with No Mirrors” and the sing-songy, banjo-laden “Mailman” feel completely out of place, when they could have been so much more effectively positioned elsewhere. For example, if the slight “Mailmain” segued directly into the mighty “Torchsong,” the creative juxtaposition would prove unbearably evil.

As it stands, only the last third of the album flows well, dominated mostly by languid and tranquil (tranguid?) electronic instrumentation. The trance-inducing “Oceans Blue” finds the band almost in Eno mode but with a patented LPD spin, putting forth repetitive ambience (which could be loop-based) for nearly 8 minutes only to interrupt it suddenly with an ominous, rickety motor that rudely jolts listeners out of their comas. This kind of brilliance proves that the Dots’ most boring excursions of the recent past have been primarily the result of laziness by not tending to the finer details. After the brief “Savannah Red,” an instrumental blip that showcases the album’s only musical bass line/rhythm combination, dissonance returns in the perfect album closer, “Cubic Caesar,” which is so saturated in listless barbiturate haze that I find it extremely difficult to muster the energy to hear another song immediately afterward.

BLONDER

In conclusion, I’m more surprised by this record than I am disappointed, and though I’m not going to run out and buy it in 20 different physical formats as I might have done a few years ago, I’m perfectly happy with my $10 digital download. Make of that what you will…

And see you next time!

The Legendary Pink Dots may have meant the first word in their moniker to be ironic back when they named themselves during the post-punk anti-rock star era. But nearly three decades later, the irony now is that they’ve pretty much ended up living up to their own billing. The Amsterdam-by-way-of-London quartet has not only held to their defiantly experimental concept, but they’ve done it independently of the recording industry.

“Somewhere inside me I always knew I was in for a bit of a long ride,” explains founder and main artistic voice Edward Ka-Spel about the group’s longevity. “I did have a lot of ideas that I wanted to see through back then, and I’m still seeing them through.”

Ka-Spel says he feels “no commercial consideration at all” when constructing the group’s records, which have been known to mix and match everything from off-kilter drumbeats to spoken word sections to deceptively “childlike” ditties. “Better to miss a meal and have something you feel proud of than to slowly sell your soul,” he explains. “The music we make is the most important thing.”

The group’s newest CD, “Plutonium Blonde,” is a concept album that offers a first-person look at isolation in the digital age. “It begins with anger and ends with resignation,” he says. “By the time you get to the end, the guy is sitting in his little cube where he’s got everything he ever wanted, but he never actually leaves the cube.”

In other words, it’s another iconoclastic vision, courtesy of Ka-Spel and friends. “It’s becoming more and more refined,” he says of his artistry. “I think I’m learning how to deliver it in a better and better way.”

Written by Tony Sclafani

The Legendary Pink Dots / Edward Ka-Spel:
Plutonium Blonde / Dream Logik Part Two

[ROIR / Beta-Lactam Ring; 2008 / 2008]
Rating: 6.9 / 6.5

The Legendary Pink Dots don’t just live in their own world– in a lot of ways, they are their own world. It’s a world that doesn’t change at the same pace as ours. In fact, it scarcely has changed at all in almost thirty years. While irony is king in the world we’re trapped in most of the time, irony doesn’t even seem to exist in LPD land. The music is weird and willfully obscure, but it’s honestly weird and unpretentiously obscure. It’s a neat place to escape to if you’re willing to buy into the strange aural juxtapositions and Edward Ka-Spel’s r-less enunciation and odd lyrical predilections.

“My learning curve was so acute it formed a perfect circle/ My whole wide world was virtual so I sank back in my shell,” we hear on the opening lines from “Cubic Caesar”, giving a fair measurement of the band’s collective brainwave. Like many of their records, Plutonium Blonde flows like a stream of unconsciousness, morphing with shocking suddenness from twitching synth patterns and washes of pink noise to, say, a lovely banjo line that accompanies a sing-songy ode to the mailman. Addled sax wanders in and out, the band flirts with a brand of English folk that sounds like the soundtrack for a Ren Faire for Robots, and at the middle of it is Ka-Spel, who sings like a man with the mind of a mystic and the disposition of a child. The most brutal passage on the album is the last portion of “Oceans Blue”, where barely anything happens at all– the soft-toned keyboard that plays an intermittent chord is surrounded by silence so dense it’s malevolent.

This adds up to a whole that can be at once ominous, fantastical, wondrous, and above all unique. If listening to LPD is like visiting another world, listening to Ka-Spel’s latest solo outing, Dream Logik Part Two, is like ducking into someone else’s mind for a quick pint. Dream logic does indeed seem to be the organizing principle of a record Ka-Spel performs on his own, though he does credit “Ghosts” with “the bits in between” all the instruments he plays. He credits himself variously with “broken things” and “technological wonders,” and his dream world produces some weirdly lucid and accessible moments, though these are all surrounded by sped-up alien voices, passages of beatless drift, sour baroque keyboard figures, spoken word bits that sound as though recorded in large, wet rooms, straight, scraping noise, and a paean to a centipede named Cedric wherein the main rhythm is at first supplied by Ka-Spel counting to three in German.

Suffice to say, if you’re not already a fan of the Dots, this is likely not the place to start, though if you are a fan, have at it. I need to mention the quite astounding artwork for the Ka-Spel disc. It’s a multi-panel, book-bound fold-out deal that conceals a slipcase and it’s covered in psychotic, psychedelic Bosch portraits by artist Jesse Peper. It is a substantial package to say the least. The Dots artwork isn’t nearly as spectacular, but the album is another invitingly strange foray into their singular way of doing things, and one that will undoubtedly please their cult.

Reviewer: Joe Tangari

October 29, 2008

by Charissa Che
Issue date: 10/29/08
Section: Arts & Entertainment

Similar to a flutist’s way of charming a snake out of its basket, the Legendary Pink Dots ace the test when it comes to stirring the most unsettling and unexpected sentiments previously veiled within your subconscious. Their music, especially their most recent release, Plutonium Blonde, is the stuff that drives you to listen as if hypnotized to every note until the album’s end, at which point you may find yourself staring at a blank wall for a few seconds, questioning the side effects of what was just unleashed.

Formed in the 80s, the London-based Legendary Pink Dots consist, at the forefront, of vocalist and keyboardist Edward Ka-Spel and synthesist Phil Knight, otherwise known as the Silverman. Over the years, the other members of the band have altered – but, nevertheless, with over 40 records under their belt spanning two decades, this enigmatic rock group has shepherded generations of loyal goth audiences.

Appropriately so, this album recalls the Beatles later, LSD-induced efforts, only Ka-Spel and company have added a touch of edginess and melancholia that makes their music so breathtakingly jarring that to compare it with other artists – both iconic and contemporary – wouldn’t do it justice. These British lads have created something that simply cannot be tucked away into a category.

Take, for instance, the album’s longest track – the nine and a half-minute, majestic love song that is unconventional in every sense. Ka-Spel sings with an ominous, quavering voice throughout, beseeching his love to sing to him as he is celebrating “Christmas on the Moon,” which, festive as it is, is still “just another rock/ wrapped up in a fancy box.” Several minutes pass by in which nothing is heard but pulsating synths, desperate guitar riffs and Ka-Spel’s plea, “It’s time to fly!” You’re taken on an emotional spectrum parallel to the sonic metamorphosis of this song, taking on its air of cynicism at its start, ultimately arriving at a more hopeful state of mind.

Also hugely effective is the Pink Dots’ choice of song order. “A World With No Mirrors,” ends in an abysmal hollowness and the gurgling of an alien voice – this immediately segues into “My First Zonee,” a chip, frolicking ditty that would seem to fit perfectly in a children’s TV show on PBS. The tune is made all the more surreal and absurd with lyrics like “Milking the cow with my first Zonee/ Out on the trail, I’ll spank the pony,” and Ka-Spel’s perfect British storytelling voice. Whatever it is, you get the sense, upon the song’s end, that there may be nothing more desirable in the world than a Zonee.

The most brilliant track is found at the album’s conclusion. The aptly-titled “Cubic Caesar” is narrated by a quixotic hermit who is so confounded by the demands of his work that he has lost the capacity to live a truly fulfilling life. He ultimately acquiesces to the idea that maybe a contented existence simply isn’t in the stars for him – “Perhaps it’s been a decade since I touched another person/ I was always so uncertain so I chose to stay alone…” As he watches paint dry, he apologizes to all the kids he will never have because of this choice. “My schedule’s full from noon ’til night,” the song concludes. “It isn’t great but I’ll get by.” Sung in Ka-Spel’s low, demure growl, this track is one of the most heartbreaking testaments to the perils of modern life that you’re likely to come across in today’s rock.

Plutonium Blonde is just about as experimental as experimental rock can yet. What the Legendary Pink Dots have produced is chilling to the bone, harrowing and, oftentimes, even creepy – but in a good way. Their substance has only gotten better to match their style through the years. What they succeed in making, in their latest effort, is neither music nor a work of art best experienced from afar. You’ve got to check your reservations at the door, jump in and get your hands dirty with this one to get the full gist of what the band is trying to make you think and feel. Who cares about side effects, so long as having your mind ripped open and enlightened is one of them?

Confounding music critics is not the Legendary Pink Dots’ modus operandi, but it must amuse them to peruse the long lists of micro-genres that writers have come up with. For nearly three decades, the iconic experimental rock collective has distilled practically the whole of recorded music history — tape loops, synths, folk elements, drum machines, electric guitars, and whatever else the perpetually rotating roster has at its disposal — into a cohesive whole. Plutonium Blonde, the latest addition to the Dots’ enormous discography, is as bleak and gloomy as anything they’ve done before; rays of major-key sunshine and jazzy goofiness barely poke through the creeping, goth-pop atmosphere.