Forget that goths love them. Focus instead on the fact that the Brit-Amsterdamian, doom-laden, sampladelic Dots have had more oddly-foreign recruits in their 22 years than the touring company of Mamma Mia. One consistency of LPD — from 1985’s The Lovers (a personal favorite) up through new notorious fare like All The King’s Horses (Solielmoon) — is their savage republican ethos. It’s a vicious, vexing but somehow sober mix of eclectic, erotic, electronic sounds, wretched but subtle reed arrangements and scabrous messages. Their most recent electro-operatic-epic, the three-CD Chemical Playschool features old songs made new and nervous and holds nothing dear — not LPD’s avant-classical past, not their wrinkled goth pedigree. Instead, Playschool is a trip-dub-kraut-freak-folk mess of long mood-swinging instrumentals and shouted-down epiphanies powerfully linear in its diversity.
Sat., Oct. 12, 9 p.m., $14, with Oragami Gallactica, The North Star, 27th and Poplar sts., 215-684-0808.
—A.D. Amorosi
