In more than twenty years and almost three times as many records, the Legendary Pink Dots flirted with the sublime and sometimes the abyss, as now each of their new productions comes with a little fright: what side of their talent will they choose to express this time? It’s a sad album they deliver here with “The Whispering Wall”, on which Soft Toy plays a trick with a bass, an organ and some guitars. At the beginning of the second track, A Distant Summer, we find ourselves back where “All the King’s Horses” ended in 2002, with even some more fragility. Fragile and sad, Edward Ka-Spel really is on the touching In Sickness and in Health which reminds of the melancholy of Cheating the Shadow that figured on their 1998 “Nemesis Online” album. He, who told us with confidence, that he recently realized that his band would never change the world as much as he’s liked it to, would he only comfort himself to know how much his band has changed his fans’ lives? Of course, Peek a Boo sounds like a bad joke, but The Divide follows the tradition of the long psyche-rock hallucinated-everyday-story, like the ones the singer improvises during concerts. The best of this album surely is the long and last track, made of the three songs Sunken Pleasure / Rising Pleasure / No Walls, No Strings where Edward affords himself a beautiful cold a capella moment, before being snatched by a wall of bagpipes from where whispers of new age sequences get out, close to the Silverman’s solo efforts.
Bertrand Hamonou
(The date of this review is unknown.)
