Menu

Legendary Pink Dots

a0589559916_16

The Tear Garden, “Astral Elevator” (Artoffact, 2025)

,

I was definitely not expecting a new Tear Garden album this year, but Edward Ka-Spel and cEvin Key’s fitful four-decade collaboration has happily resurfaced once again after an eight-year hiatus. I am tempted to call Astral Elevator a return to the duo’s “classic” sound after the more eclectic and playful The Brown Acid Caveat, but the only real difference is that this latest batch of tightly edited and hook-heavy “singles” has been purged of the more groovy and disco/dance elements of its predecessor. I suppose that makes Astral Elevator a somewhat darker release, but the world is now a darker place then it was back in 2017 and there are a handful of highlights here that certainly brighten my small part of it.

As is often the case, The Tear Garden’s usual cast of characters (Key and Ka-Spel) is expanded with some contributions from both the Legendary Pink Dots and Skinny Puppy camps (Randall Frazier, Dre Robinson, and the late Dwayne Goettel) this time around. Notably, however, the duo have also enlisted artist Cory Gorski to make videos for the album’s singles and he wove some very impressive surrealist magic with his vision for the lead single “A Return.” Someone should really give these guys a few million dollars to make a The Wall-style animated epic.

Trippy stop-motion paper mache visuals aside, “A Return” is a solid representation of what to expect with this album: synth-heavy electronic pop with lilting, melancholy vocals and an anachronistic bit of chamber music atmosphere. I suppose the same could be said of many Legendary Pink Dots releases as well, but Ka-Spel’s more freewheeling and baroque psych tendencies are beautifully balanced out by Key’s talent for tight and punchy electronic music production (with some help on the mixing/mastering end from Greg Reely). The buzzing and throbbing low end, pounding synth-drums, and the synth solo in “A Return” are all quite nice as well. 

As a long-time fan, Tear Garden business-as-usual is generally just fine by me, but there are a few pieces here that transcend my expectations quite impressively as well and they are my primary evidence that this creative union remains as vital and relevant as ever. “War Crier,” for example, is easily one of the most poignant and bittersweetly heartbreaking pieces that Ka-Spel has ever recorded (I especially enjoy the pregnant pauses that he throws into lines like “they wish that they could believe…in something”). Wisely, the music is mostly kept to just a minimal and subdued simmer of shuffling drums, deep bass, subtle psych touches, and streaks of lush dream-pop synths, as Ka-Spel’s wounded Romanticism deserves the entire spotlight and gets it.

Elsewhere, “Unreal” is an especially fine example of Ka-Spel’s “hallucinatory soundscape” side, as a female AI delivers a timely and sardonic monologue about paranoia and the nature of being human that culminates in a looping accusation of “explain yourself: are you authentically artificial?” over an abstract backdrop of ominous dark ambiance, squiggling and bubbling electronics, and clattering percussion. As always, Edward Ka-Spel remains an unusually clear-eyed and scathing observer/critic of our accelerating slide into a technological dystopia. 

As for the remaining pieces, they are a solid enough batch with a couple of other gems (“Lady Fate” and “Always Take the Highway”), but their pleasures tend to be less about Ka-Spel’s songwriting genius and more about cool arrangements, specific passages, and inspired musical ideas. For example, “It Just Ain’t So” features an impressively propulsive industrial groove fitfully gnawed by lysergic swells of abstract electronics, while the driving and muscular throb of “A Developing World” is nicely enhanced by breakbeat eruptions and dubby percussion and vocal effects. Unsurprisingly, Ka-Spel has some great lyrical moments as well, as both “War Crier” and “In The Name Of” feature some lines that hit like a gut punch.

Overall, Astral Elevator is an unusually strong Tear Garden album. While their early albums like The Last Man To Fly will always have a special place in my heart, there is no denying that the duo have gotten a lot better at tightening and sharpening their sound over the years (and have also reined in some of their more indulgent tendencies). They did not get rid of ALL their indulgent tendencies, however, as “Chow Mein” is certainly an endearingly weird curveball. While there are also a few less successful pieces to be found that can be reasonably described as “dubious experiments” or “not quite fully formed songs,” those rare lulls and meandering moments are largely eclipsed by the fact that Tear Garden are functionally an unwaveringly interesting, unique, and eclectic band. Moreover, Ka-Spel and Key clearly spent an enormous amount of time crafting these pieces into a richly layered and immersive experience worthy of two such iconic underground music lifers.  

Listen here.

a1381014859_16

Legendary Pink Dots, “Island of Jewels” (Metropolis, 2021)

,

Metropolis Records continues their ambitious LPD reissue campaign with an expanded and remastered edition of this oft-fascinating album from the band’s celebrated mid-’80s hot streak. According to the band, Island of Jewels was “the natural successor” to The Tower, but it was chronologically sandwiched between two of the Dots’ most beloved albums from the era (1985’s Asylum and 1988’s Any Day Now). Being eclipsed on either side by arguably superior albums has not been optimal for Island of Jewels‘ stature within the LPD canon, yet it still captured the band in legitimately inspired form (albeit in service of an especially bleak vision this time around). 

As I did not start delving into the Dots’ oeuvre until the mid-’90s (I was lured in by The Tear Garden), I still find it a bit difficult to embrace some of the conspicuously “’80s” elements from this particular phase, as the synth sounds and slap/fretless bass themes have not aged terribly well. Then again, it seems deeply wrong-headed to take issue with the tools that the band used to craft such a playfully surreal and endearing collection of songs, as only a fool would let passing stylistic trends rob them of their sense of wonder. While I would describe Island of Jewels as a more of an acquired taste than some of the surrounding releases, it is a taste worth acquiring, as this album is a delightfully hook-filled and hallucinatory world to immerse oneself in.

Belatedly delving into ’80s-era Legendary Pink Dots is a curious experience, as albums like this one capture an incredibly imaginative and talented group of musicians still somewhat in the thrall of their influences and the popular instrumentation of the time. As a result, a lot of this album sounds like someone from the Victorian era became obsessed with ’70s prog and set out to make a half-carnivalesque/half-melancholy concept album armed with a fretless bass and an inexpensive synthesizer. Given that singular vibe, even the weakest songs are compellingly weird, but the tradeoff is that the best songs almost always have some kind of irksome imperfection. 

Perhaps that latter part works in the band’s favor entertainment-wise though, as the dated sounds undercut Edward Ka-Spel’s bleakness to create something more charming and fun. The first half of the album is teeming with such skewed delights. My favorite is the wonky, lurching “Dairy,” which feels like a unhinged magician with a drum machine leading a dance party on a disturbingly Sid & Marty Krofft-inspired children’s show. “The Red and the Black” deserves an honorable mention too, as it sounds like a macabre art-pop ensemble performing a shape-shifting cabaret show, but a mischievous bassist decided to wrong-foot everyone by obsessively playing a cheerily cartoonish riff over and over again.

Of course, there are some legitimate Dots classics here too, such as the neo-classical goth-pop balladry of “Shock of Contact.” To some degree, it feels like a prog band doing a spacey electric cover of an old harpsichord piece, but that aspect is eclipsed by an especially haunting and beautiful vocal performance from Ka-Spel. The other big highlight comes in the form of the “Our Lady” trilogy near the end of the album. The first part, “Our Lady In Chambers,” feels like a darkly lysergic piano ballad plucked from a fairy tale, but one propelled by a thudding drum machine, liquid fretless bass riffage, harmonized lead guitar, dramatic violin flourishes, and occasional stabs of fake horns. Ka-Spel’s vocals are wonderfully tender, poetic, and beautiful, so it is easy to imagine a contemporary live version of the piece being an absolute stunner. 

I was also impressed by “Our Lady of Darkness,” which initially sounds like an absinthe-drunk mad genius performing a one-man opera in his mountain castle, but unexpectedly erupts into a very cool and intricate instrumental outro. Notably, the vinyl and digital versions of this reissue enhance the original twelve-song album with eight freewheeling bonus pieces, and they make this latest incarnation considerably more fascinating than the original. My notes on the bonus material are full of phrases like “terrifying German expressionist puppet show set in space” or “sounds like a disco-era erotic vampire musical on rollerskates,” and those are not even the pieces identified as “Version Ridiculous” (an honor reserved solely for “No Bell No Prize”). 

Needless to say, those are exquisite experiences that are impossible to find elsewhere, but the biggest surprise was “This Could Be The End (Alternative),” which radically transforms Asylum‘s closer into a ghostly folk gem with Attrition’s Julia Niblock on vocals. I would not have a expected a bonus track with Ka-Spel on the sidelines to steal the show, but the timeless “folk horror” feel makes it one of my favorite outliers in the LPD canon.

Samples can be found here.

a3909023725_16

Legendary Pink Dots, “Angel in the Detail” (Metropolis, 2019)

,

One thing that I have learned time and time again over my years as a Legendary Pink Dots fan is that Edward Ka-Spel’s muse is an eternally unpredictable one: wonderful songs can appear anywhere, anytime, and in any shape and high-profile releases are not necessarily always going to be the strongest ones. Nevertheless, The Legendary Pink Dots’ recent run of albums on Metropolis has reliably featured some of the band’s tightest and most hook-driven songs, which certainly appeals to those fans hoping for a reprise of the band’s late ’80s/early ’90s heyday. 

I am not sure that I would include myself in that category, as I am quite fond of the band’s more hallucinatory and abstract fare, but I do believe that Ka-Spel can be a legitimate pop genius when he is properly inspired and able to rein in his more indulgent tendencies. Happily, this latest release (two years in the making) finds him in especially fine form, offering up an especially concise and focused array of great would-be singles along with some more outré forays into skewed psych-pop experimentation. While I very much enjoyed the more playfully warped side of 2016’s Pages of Aquarius, I feel quite confident in stating that Angel in the Detail is the strongest album yet to emerge from the band’s Metropolis era.

One of the elements that has always fascinated me about The Legendary Pink Dots is that their albums often feel like dispatches from a world significantly more poetic, magical, and mysterious than the one that the rest of us live in. I have a legitimately difficult time picturing Edward Ka-Spel ever doing something as mundane as standing in line at a post office or buying groceries, as his lyrics seem to come from a twilight realm of permanent sardonic whimsy. 

Occasionally, however, the outside world becomes insistent enough to bleed into his vision and Angel in the Detail is one such release, though it would be a stretch to view it as political in any conventional sense. Instead, veiled references to current events pass through the prism of Ka-Spel’s artistry to emerge as something that feels reassuringly wise and hopeful (even though there is plenty of wryly scathing commentary on falling empires, ugly futures, and the dissolution of genuine human connections). Moreover, Angel in the Detail is often quite a perversely fun album, teeming with propulsive grooves, catchy melodies, and playfully adventurous psych flourishes. In some ways, it feels like The Legendary Pink Dots are throwing a party as the world burns around them, but it would be more apt to state that they are merely maintaining their sense of wonder and joie de vivre as this phase of human history draws to a close and another begins (or does not).

My initial impression was that the album is frontloaded with all of its best songs, but that sense has become increasingly muddled as I listen to it more and more. Still, the first few songs are definitely the ones that feel like the strongest singles. The opener “Happy Birthday Mr. President” is probably the would-be hit of the album, as it is built upon a wonderfully insistent beat and strikes a perfect balance between melody and lysergic production wizardry. 

Nevertheless, it is the following “Double Double” that feels like the album’s liltingly gorgeous centerpiece, approximating a languorously sensual and subtly hallucinatory kindred spirit to Spandau Ballet’s “True.” Obviously, Ka-Spel and his lyrics are the heart of the piece, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that it would not be nearly as great without Erik Drost’s fluid and inspired guitar playing. The band had no shortage of other imaginative and unexpected pop twists saved up for this album though. The most notable example is inarguably the following “Junkyard,” which combines a remarkably muscular bass line with a drum machine beat that sounds almost like slowed-down New Jack Swing. 

Elsewhere, “Neon Calculator” rides a thumping kick drum, jangling guitars, and a burbling synth motif into an impressively tight and danceable maelstrom of deranged noise and sax squall. As much as the album’s many ambitious twists delight me, however, the achingly lovely ballad “Itchycoo Shark” comes very close to stealing the album with little more than Ka-Spel’s voice and some simple synth arpeggios (and a truly killer chorus). Curiously, it prematurely burns out in a roiling guitar crescendo, then kaleidoscopically segues into a completely different piece (“Isle of Sighs”) rather than following through on its initial promise. Nevertheless, it may very well contain the most beautiful and perfect four-minute stretch of the band’s career, though I remain perplexed by the decision to mash it together with another piece.

Notably, a similar trajectory occurs with the album as a whole, as the impressive cavalcade of tightly structured, hook-filled songs starts to go off the rails with the sixth song (“My Land/Parallels”) and veers into much more eclectic and experimental territory. While I am very much not a fan of the sing-song sixties psych-pop pastiche of “Maid to Measure,” the remaining four pieces are quite an interesting mixed bag. The weirder, more extended pieces tend to be the best of the lot, particularly the blooping, seething “My Land” and its hushed, eschatological second act. 

The closing “Red Flag” is another ambitious delight, unfolding as a wonderfully slow-burning and moody pop song that takes some surreal detours over the course of its eleven minutes (including an especially lovely choral interlude). It makes for an impressively strong and focused finish for an album that seemed like it had started to wander off its path and lose its way. Moreover, it adds one more great song to the pile already amassed earlier. As far as I am concerned, Angel already clears the bar for a classic album by the end of the fifth song, so the occasional flashes of inspiration on the second half are icing on the cake. 

The Legendary Pink Dots are far too playfully weird, restless, and experimentally minded for me to ever expect an album that fits neatly in my personal vision of a flawless whole, but they offer something better instead: they still manage to surprise and move me after four decades of releasing albums. When Ka-Spel and The Silverman are at their best on Angel in the Detail, the results are as stellar as anything from their purported golden age and that is extremely heartening to hear. With this album, The Legendary Pink Dots feel like a wonderfully reinvigorated band at the peak of their powers.

Samples can be found here.

a1403629301_16

Legendary Pink Dots, “The Golden Age” (Metropolis, 2019)

,

Newly remastered and reissued on Metropolis, 1988’s The Golden Age hails from an especially transitory and unsettled phase of The Legendary Pink Dots’ history: it was composed in the wake of a disastrous tour in which half of the band quit. Also, Edward Ka-Spel and The Silverman were kicked out of their squat in Amsterdam and left the city to take up residence in Niels van Hoorn’s caravan in the countryside. And, to flesh out that scene still further, the album was recorded in a poorly heated farmhouse. That seems like quite a dark and rough stretch to me, yet it is clear from interviews that Ka-Spel found the experience refreshing and creatively rejuvenating and both he and The Silverman have since singled out The Golden Age as one of their favorite LPD releases. 

I cannot say that I fully share that assessment myself, as it is a bit of a difficult and uneven album at times, but there is definitely a brilliant EP lurking among this strange and kaleidoscopic suite of songs. At its best, The Golden Age feels like a playfully lysergic, darkly whimsical, and endearingly baroque series of regret-soaked scenes plucked from a vivid, haunting novel that only exists in Edward Ka-Spel’s head. 

Despite hemorrhaging several members on that ill-starred tour, The Legendary Pink Dots were still clinging somewhat tenaciously to being a full band during their pastoral exile, as Ka-Spel and The Silverman were joined by Hans Meyer and Patrick Q. White. The presence of the latter is especially important, as his lovely and melodic violin arrangements provide an elegance and Romantic grandeur that beautifully counterbalances the colorfully off-kilter and carnivalesque surreality of these songs. 

That is especially true of “Hotel Noir,” the album’s quietly devastating centerpiece. Lyrically, “Noir” easily ranks among Ka-Spel’s most gorgeously poetic and evocative work, as a melancholy ghost wistfully recounts his past romantic conquests in a lonely hotel room, belatedly feeling the sting of his misdeeds over a backdrop that sounds like a hallucinatory ballroom dance.Without the layers of strings, it would still be a delightful piece of music, but it would not pack nearly the same emotional punch: Wright’s languorously dancing and swooning strings add a welcome gravitas that the synths and drum machine could never achieve on their own. 

The album’s second masterpiece follows just a few songs later with “The Month After,” which improbably combines a stumbling, clattering drum machine beat, candy-colored neo-classical fluorishes, and an almost reggae-style piano groove into a darkly psychedelic flight of pop genius. Also, it features one of the most bizarrely poignant verses in the entire LPD canon (“I laughed when you called me the snail…you’re not such a picture yourself”).

The rest of the album is a bit of a mixed bag, however, as a handful of other gems rubs elbows with some rough moments that either did not age particularly well or just feel like bombastic filler. The former, unfortunately, is best illustrated by the opening “Maniac,” which clumsily erupts into double-time violin and guitar shredfests. Of the latter, “And Even The Vegetables Screamed/Regression” is the most uncomfortably heavy-handed, while “Stille Nacht” merely feels like a hallucinatory locked-groove experiment that would have been a better fit on one of the band’s more abstract albums. 

Those rare creative misadventures aside, The Golden Age is mostly a collection of wonderfully skewed and psych-damaged art-pop that captures the band in a particularly hook-minded and concise state of mind. The lilting “The More It Changes” is simply a straight-forward good LPD song, but both “Methods” and “Lisa’s Separation/The Golden Age” have enough flourishes of inspiration or striking strangeness to elevate them into something more memorable. 

If I was curating my own perfect version of The Golden Age, however, I would augment “Hotel Noir” and “The Month After” with just the skittering melancholy of “The Talent Contest” and the gloopily warped and macabre lunacy of “Black Castles.” Admittedly, “The Talent Contest” would just barely make the cut, but the other three pieces are among the most undiluted and sustained moments of brilliance in the band’s nearly four-decade career.

Curiously, the Metropolis reissue appends a handful of extra songs (mostly live recordings from 1987) to stretch the album into a double LP. I suspect this was just to lure back the fans who had already purchased the 2012 or 2016 remasters that the band had digitally issued themselves. In my case, that tactic worked beautifully, but The Golden Age would have benefited more from being shortened than it did from being lengthened. 

That said, all of the best songs conveniently fall on the first LP, so I suppose Metropolis cunningly achieved the best of both worlds (whether that was their intention or not). More importantly, their beautiful vinyl reissue did exactly what beautiful vinyl reissues are supposed to do: it grabbed my attention and got me to spend some serious time with an album that I never fully appreciated or ever thought about all that much. And The Golden Age is an album that very much deserves that renewed attention and reevaluation. 

There is probably some glib and wince-inducing metaphor that I could come up with about how imperfections make a diamond more special, but it would be more accurate to simply say that this album reflects a period of white-hot inspiration that occasionally yielded some absolutely revelatory results. It is always a delight to discover that some of my new favorite songs have been secretly hiding in my collection all along. While there are definitely several LPD albums that are more uniformly strong than The Golden Age, I would be hard-pressed to think of any that hit higher highs.

Samples can be found here.

a2821721032_16

Legendary Pink Dots, “Any Day Now” (PIAS (1987), Metropolis (2018))

,

First released on Play It Again Sam back in 1987 and newly reissued on Metropolis, Any Day Now is one of the jewels of The Legendary Pink Dots’ ’80s discography. Sadly, I was far too busy scouring Circus for Guns N’ Roses news to notice it when it first surfaced and only started to delve into the Dots’ catalog in the mid-’90s. As a result, Any Day Now was already 25 years old by the time I eventually heard it as part of the Dots’ ambitious remastering campaign a few years back. In some respects, I suppose Any Day Now felt a bit dated in places when I finally heard it, but I was far more struck by how vibrant and fleshed-out the band sounded as a six-piece (the violin of Patrick Wright is especially delightful). I am hesitant to say that The Legendary Pink Dots once “rocked,” but the full-band aesthetic of that era was certainly quite a different experience than the more distilled and Ka-Spel-centric fare of recent years. Both eras have their share of highlights, certainly, but Any Day Now captures The Legendary Pink Dots at their most lively, playful, and hook-minded, largely excising all of their most indulgent tendencies to craft an incredibly endearing suite of psych-pop gems. This is a legitimate classic.

The overall aesthetic of Any Day Now is quite a fascinating and unusual one, resembling a cross between an ambitious prog rock concept album and an unnervingly creepy children’s book, evoking a wide range of characters and scenes that seem to weave a strange and elusive narrative. I have no idea what it all means or if any of the individual pieces are intended parts of larger story, but it is certainly feels like colorful, dramatic, and surreal journey regardless. For example, the violin-driven waltz “The Gallery” feels like a charmingly foppish bit of cabaret with amusingly wobbly fretless bass, while the brief “The Peculiar Funfair” resembles a glimpse of a manic and nightmarish circus. Elsewhere, the album’s most tender and nakedly lovely piece, “Laguna Beach,” is a delicately twinkling bit of chamber pop balladry that sounds plucked from a fairytale.

Lurking among all of those anachronistic divergences are a number of songs that are very much of their time, however, embodying a particularly eccentric blend of the era’s pervading art-pop tropes: big electronic drums, sliding fretless bass, saxophone solos, and proggy instrumental breaks. There is even a brief and amusing flourish of slapping and popping funk bass at one point. On pieces like “Strychnine Kiss” and “True Love” that aesthetic can certainly feel dated, but it at least feels dated in a very charming way: it still sounds unmistakably like The Legendary Pink Dots, but it feels like The Legendary Pink Dots crashing some ’80s pop gig and doing an impromptu set on borrowed instruments. Also, several of the more ’80s-sounding pieces are more than strong enough to transcend such quirks. In particular, “Neon Mariner” stands as an especially striking highlight, balancing out its booming drums and awkwardly funky bass with wonderfully moody keyboards, lovely violin countermelodies, tight songcraft, and an impressively strong chorus.

Notably, Play It Again Sam’s 1988 CD reissue of Any Day Now appended the Under Glass EP, which has remained attached to the album ever since (to some fans’ chagrin). I think those fans can be safely dismissed as absolute lunatics though, as the three songs from Under Glass definitely make the album significantly better and more substantial. Normally, I too tend to be hostile to the idea of expanding a classic album with bonus tracks, as most bonus tracks generally fall into that category precisely because they were not good enough to make the album.

While I could give or take the driving rocker “The Plasma Twins,” the thumping and pulsing electro-pop of “Under Glass” is one of the single most perfect pop songs on the entire album. More importantly, “The Light In My Little Girl’s Eyes” is one of the most gloriously weird and creepily erotic songs in the entire LPD canon. I cannot think of anything else quite like it, as it combines some of Ka-Spel’s finest and most unnervingly perverse lyrics (“Are you feeling dirty? Yes, but also very pleased”) with an unexpectedly propulsive and wild instrumental backdrop. There is even some light cannibalism at the end (something for everyone, really). I never expected to write that the Dots had a killer rhythm section, but the band was legitimately firing on all cylinders in this case and bassist Jason Salmon and drummer Tony Copier deserve a hell of a lot of the credit for that. Even the guitar and violin solos are great. Rarely have I heard the Dots tear it up quite like they do here.

In a perfect world, the album probably would end there, but Any Day Now is further augmented by one final song, “Gladiators (Version Apocalypse),” which comes from Stone Circles but was recorded during the same sessions as this album. As such, its inclusion makes sense, but its proggy jamming does not hit nearly the same heights as “Little Girl’s Eyes.” It is kind of amusing and fascinating to travel back to a time when Ka-Spel and The Silverman still had identifiable influences, as they have long since transcended that and seem far more like a (super)natural phenomenon that is only influenced by itself these days. I mean that in the best possible way, of course, as the duo have plunged so deeply into their lysergic rabbit hole at this point that Ka-Spel seems more like an impossibly wise psychedelic shaman than an unusually literate frontman of a cool rock band. I certainly have room in my heart for both.

My only real caveat with Any Day Now is that it captures The Legendary Pink Dots at their most catchy, accessible, and (comparatively) straightforward, which is a contrast to the deeper, more intense, and more experimental fare that the band is generally known for. That has caused some fans to view it is one of LPD’s more lightweight releases, but it does not feel that way to me at all. While Any Day Now is certainly not heavy psychedelia by any means, it is far from a watered-down or toothless version of the band. Instead, it feels like they just had an unusually great batch of songs and executed them with atypically sharp focus, resulting in quite a bright, vibrant, listenable, and (again, comparatively) fun album. As such, Any Day Now is easily one of the most essential releases in the band’s entire overwhelming discography and an ideal point of entry for the curious.

Samples can be found here.
a0566416458_16

The Tear Garden, “The Brown Acid Caveat” (Metropolis/Sub-Conscious Communications, 2017)

, ,

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from a new Tear Garden album, as it has been nearly a decade since the last one and The Brown Acid Caveat slowly came together while cEvin Key was dealing with cancer and Edward Ka-Spel was deeply immersed in I Can Spin A Rainbow. Despite that, the impending release bizarrely took on a near-mythic significance for me, as this project has inspired several of Ka-Spel most enduring moments of genius (“Romulus and Venus,” “Hyperform,” etc.) and he has been riding quite a (fitful) hot streak over the last few years. Also, the time simply felt right for The Tear Garden to return. 

Happily, Caveat largely lives up to my unreasonably high expectations even while it subverts them, as the duo largely eschew deep psychedelia in favor of propulsive, tightly structured electronic pop (albeit with some inspired detours along the way). Naturally, the album’s hookiness is mingled with Ka-Spel and Key’s deeply skewed and oft-hallucinatory aesthetic, but I was still completely unprepared for the throbbing disco groove of the opening “Strange Land.”

I dearly wish I could have been at the listening party that Key and Ka-Spel threw in LA for the release of this album (it was a crowd-funded release), as I would have absolutely loved to see the looks on everyone’s faces when they hit “play” and the sexy bass throb and disco thump erupted from the speakers. “Strange Land” is definitely the first Tear Garden song that I can imagine someone blasting as they speed along the Autobahn in a classic convertible, but Edward Ka-Spel is still Edward Ka-Spel, so the infectious groove, jangling guitars, and strong melodies are still shot through with a healthy dose of surreality—it just happens to be couched in stronger hooks than usual. 

While the naked catchiness of “Strange Land” turns out to be a bit of an exception (sadly, this is not quite The Tear Garden’s “party album”), Key and Ka-Spel definitely place a very strong emphasis on groove and tight structure here. The closest thing to another would-be hit single is only “Calling Time,” which boasts a similarly fluid bass line, 4/4 thump, tight structure, and penchant for catchy vocal melodies. Within that poppy framework, however, the duo allow quite a bit more weirdness to kick in, as the beat features an exhalation-like call-and-response snare and the piece becomes increasing buffeted by sputtering and jabbering electronics as it unfolds. 

Less accessible still is my favorite piece on the album, “Lola’s Rock,” a classic Ka-Spel narrative about a giant meteor speeding toward the earth that unfolds over an erratically stumbling beat mingled with woozy Theremin-like synths, squiggling electronics, deranged-sounding textural intrusions, and dubby percussion flourishes (quite fitting, given that Twilight Circus’s Ryan Moore had a hand in some of these recordings).

The rest of the album is a considerably less groove-centric, however: the first half feels like an appealingly hooky gateway designed to lure me into the deeper and more lysergic waters of the second half. The duo’s pop instincts largely remain intact though, even as they leave the surrealist dancefloor far in the rearview mirror. On the lovely and lilting waltz “Kiss Don’t Tell,” Key and Ka-Spel craft a gorgeous piece of psychedelic chamber pop that feels like it was recorded inside a snowglobe: the swaying and elegant rhythm, the twinkling synth melodies, and the languorous glissando of Martijn De Kleer’s guitar all combine to evoke a wonderful illusion of timelessness and dreamy unreality. 

Elsewhere, the duo shine again with the simmering and faintly menacing “Sinister Science,” which weaves a brooding spell from a skeletal groove, a richly textured haze of electronic effects, and Patrick Wright’s Romantic and melancholy strings. “Stars On The Sidewalk,” on the other hand, feels like a reprise of the winning “Hyperform” formula: a slow-burning and minimalist pulse of insistent synthesizer endlessly creeps forward beneath Ka-Spel’s ominous and understated vocals. 

More than anything else on the album, “Stars” sounds like a return to the classic Tear Garden sound, right down to an extended length and an interlude of expected psych tropes like a guitar solo and some space-y whooshing. I like it, but this latest reconvening of the core duo has largely transcended the more straight-forward psychedelia of their early years. The Tear Garden is on another plane altogether these days, so indulgences and rock-isms feel conspicuously out of place now. 

Even during its weaker moments, however, The Brown Acid Caveat shows that Ka-Spel and Key can engage in any kind of stylistic tourism they wish and still come out with a memorable song that nimbly dodges pastiche and feels very much like Tear Garden (i.e. the acoustic blues of the closing “Object”). During their stronger moments like “Lola’s Rock,” however, Key and Ka-Spel display a distinctive vision and synergistic chemistry that no one else could possibly replicate.

If The Brown Acid Caveat has a flaw, it is probably its length: it would be much stronger if it were condensed into a single LP rather than a double one. In Tear Garden’s defense, however, they simply had an excess of fine material to share: while this might be an overwhelming album to take in in one sitting, it is nevertheless a solid and filler-free affair from start to finish. Also, plunging into an epic like this feels like a legitimately immersive and mind-bending event, which is probably something that could not be achieved with a condensed version that pared away everything but the highlights. 

My other minor quibble is more of an observation: previous and more uneven Tear Garden albums have yielded some of my favorite songs ever (“In Search of My Rose,” for example), yet there is tentatively nothing on The Brown Acid Caveat that quite joins that rarefied pantheon. The compensation, however, is that this album is probably the strongest whole that the union of Key and Ka-Spel has ever produced: everything here is at least very good and a handful of pieces are even better than that. 

In more practical terms, I will probably be putting “Romulus and Venus” on mixtapes until I die, but when I want to dive into an entire Tear Garden album, this will most likely be the one that I choose. As such, my minor grievances are mostly just reasons why this legitimately excellent album falls shy of being a legitimately perfect album: my overall impression is almost entirely delight. I would have been happy with just a return to form, but The Brown Acid Caveat feels like the reinvigorated beginning of a promising new chapter, which is a truly astonishing feat from a project three decades into its run.

Listen here.

the-legendary-pink-dots-chemical-playschool-volumes-19-and-20-Cover-Art

Legendary Pink Dots, “Chemical Playschool 19 & 20” (Beta-Lactam Ring, 2016)

,

Over the last two decades or so, my Legendary Pink Dots fandom has gone through quite a few different phases, but my current self is most enamored with the Chemical Playschool series. Each new installment always feels like a large and mysterious gift-wrapped box that unexpectedly shows up at my house, stuffed full of plenty of random things that I did not particularly want and a few revelatory surprises that absolutely knock me sideways (finding the latter is always the fun part, obviously). This latest plunge into the band’s unfettered experimental urges, quietly released for the band’s fall 2016 tour, is an especially rich treasure trove: it does not so much feel like a meandering psychedelic fever dream of orphaned ideas and studio experiments so much as a rich tapestry of evocative and coherent themes expertly blurred together into a mesmerizing fantasia. This is easily one of my favorite LPD albums in recent memory.

Uncharacteristically, Chemical Playschool 19 opens with “Real World,” an actual catchy song that sounds like it would have easily fit on one of the Dots’ more accessible album intended for (relative) mass-consumption. Thematically, however, it fits very much into the overarching theme of sardonic commentary on the modern world that runs throughout the album. Of course, “Real World” never quite reaches the finish line (this is a Chemical Playschool album, after all), appropriately dissolving into lysergic abstraction only to cohere anew as the similarly song-like (but much stranger) “El Cid.” Bizarrely, all of this material was recorded all the way back in blissfully pre-Trump and pre-Brexit 2015, which makes the tone of political pessimism eerily prescient, though that timeline might explain Ka-Spel’s fixation on guns here, as 2015 was yet another prolific year for mass shootings in the US. This year will probably be prolific in that regard too, but xenophobia seems to have seized the zeitgeist and become the hotter trend here these days. Perhaps that will be the theme of the next pair of Chemical Playschools.

In any case, “Real World” and “El Cid” reveal themselves to be mere appetizers for a mesmerizing 30th anniversary re-envisioning of Asylum‘s classic “So Gallantly Screaming.” Edward Ka-Spel is in peak form, delivering a blackly funny and rhyming indictment of America over a simmering bed of drones and electronics (“Now the Hollywood sunset is served in a can”). As much as I love the content, I may love the phantasmagoric and shifting structure even more, as Ka-Spel drifts in and out of the piece, sharing the spotlight with a wonderfully surreal and sometimes nightmarish collage of samples. The remainder of the Chemical Playschool 19 disc does not offer any more dazzling centerpieces of that caliber, but the quality level and focus stay atypically high with the gently burbling and shuffling reverie of “Sunset Strip” and the foreboding and industrial-damaged “Impeccable Machine.” The languorous, understated and warped psych-rock of “How Many Fingers?” is especially wonderful, making me wish it were a stand-alone song. Part of that is highly subjective, as I always prefer Ka-Spel’s wry and/or laid-back vocals to his more urgent ones, but “Fingers” also offers a very cool bass line and some nice flourishes of backwards melodies.

The Chemical Playschool 20 disc initially feels like more of the same, opening with a solid “rock” song (“Hysterical”) followed by some woozy, synth-based ambient drift, but then the bottom drops out and the album plunges into a deep rabbit hole of utter derangement with “iTranslate.” Following a brief big band-style fanfare, Ka-Spel turns up to nervously announce the call letters of a fictional radio station (his halting and weary delivery resembles that of someone who has been in an interrogation room without sleep for a few days). Then a considerably more animated radio announcer takes the mic to let me know that they are about to present the first ever interview with an alien from outer space (with Ka-Spel acting as translator, of course). 

It initially seems like the Dots at their most cringe-inducing and proggily indulgent, but then it becomes unexpectedly very funny as the translation gets increasingly awkward and lewd (“may we eat and may we drink each other and exchange…biological yogurt?”). Then, after a sustained interlude of buzzing, druggy abstraction and warped choral samples, the band erupts into the best “song” on the album: “Amy in the Underworld,” a delightfully kitschy bit of psych-pop built upon a foundation of skittering drums, liltingly melodic vocals, and swirling hallucinatory weirdness (Erik Drost even sneaks in some very surf-sounding guitar at the end).

Following the atypically radiant, major-key, and almost Beatles-esque balladry of “Miss August” (it thankfully gets a bit darker and more fractured as it progresses), the album comes to an end with a pair of absolutely perfect pieces in a row. The first, “Carnival Cracker,” is admittedly quite a brief one, but its blown-out cheap synth tones and maniacally insistent beat feel like a gleefully out-of control post-mutiny parade at a psychiatric hospital. Those short-lived festivities draw a close with the epic “The Answer (At Least for Today),” which captures Ka-Spel in narrative mode once more, this time in the guise of an omniscient sage dismantling the entirety of our mundane reality and understanding of time over a faintly sinister bed of The Silverman’s synthesizers. 

Again, Ka-Spel is in top form, managing to seem impossibly wise, witheringly sardonic, and playfully absurd all at the same time (“or you eat the alarm clock because it tastes like blueberries”). With an appropriately simmering backdrop of vague menace and the right degree of deadpan, messianic gravitas, Ka-Spel can make just about anything seem like the most rarefied and profound revelation. When I think about why I love the Legendary Pink Dots, it is generally pieces like “The Answer” that spring to mind—those rare and precious moments where it feels like I am receiving an intergalactic transmission of ancient wisdom refracted through a fog of psychedelics.

Of the two discs, I prefer Chemical Playschool 20, though it is not necessarily better than Playschool 19. In fact, the first disc probably has the stronger songs and melodies. On the album’s second half, however, the band seem far more intent on breaking away from their expected trajectory and go much further out on their already rather outré limb. Far more important than the differences between the two halves, however, are the similarities: while the whole point of the Chemical Playschool series is ostensibly to give free rein to more experimental urges, this latest plunge into the Dots’ singularly skewed collective psyche shows welcome signs of rigorous editing. 

While the content itself is certainly no less strange and adventurous than usual, it feels like all of the unnecessary fat and water-treading has been excised. None of these pieces ever overstay their welcome and the band never gets lost in amorphous, space-y drift (a recurring peril in this series). Instead, this double-album just seems to flow seamlessly and purposefully from one strong idea to another with no unnecessary lingering or filler to slow the momentum. Also, the strong ideas are even stronger than usual, as there are at least three pieces here that could feel right at home on my imaginary personal The Best of the Legendary Pink Dots collection. I truly have nothing to gripe or grumble about here: this is a legitimately great release from start to finish.

Listen here.

a0416003428_16

Legendary Pink Dots, “Festive” (Self-Released, 2016)

It is rare for me to get very enthusiastic about tour-only releases, as I feel that artists generally want their best material to be heard by as many people as possible rather than just a handful of collectors. This compilation of The Legendary Pink Dots’ ephemeral holiday EPs is a notable exception though, as it has always driven me slightly crazy that I had missed the boat on so many special one-off LPD releases. 

Also, Edward Ka-Spel always seemed like the rare artist who might be unpredictable and prolific enough to cheerfully release his best material in an incredibly limited edition only available for a couple of weeks. Upon hearing the sprawling Festive, I can safely say that that was not the case, as a lot of LPD’s holiday epics tend to be drifting, understated soundscapes or amusing experiments in twisting and tweaking samples, but a few pieces are legitimately striking and the cumulative effect of all this material at once is pleasantly overwhelming. As such, this prolonged plunge into the benignly deranged holiday rabbit hole is strictly for fans of the Dots’ more abstract and unrepentantly indulgent side.

Festive is wisely and deceptively front-loaded with 2015’s “Hypothetical Angel,” the closest thing to a single on the entire collection. Even so, its tender and lilting balladry only lasts about three minutes before dissolving into eerie synth drift and something that sounds like a children’s choir that has been digitized, stretched, and pixelated into a chorus of lethargic, drugged robots. Then, of course, comes a delightful parade of chopped and collaged snatches of Christmas movies that hit just the right balance of whimsy, darkness, and hallucination. It may very well be the definitive phantasmagoric Christmas-themed mindfuck of all-time (I especially enjoyed the looping and cartoonish outro of “Christmas? Bleh!”). 

Yet another highlight of the first disc comes from The Legendary Pink Dots Hallowe’en Special 2015 (I love how each release sounds like a variety show): “The Wall Street Spectre.” Opening with an appealingly sing-song vocal melody over a wobbly and heavily chorused arpeggio pattern, “Spectre” takes a page from “Angel” and dissolves into something far stranger and more abstract after just a few short minutes. The crux of it all is a wry amusing and occult-tinged Ka-Spel monologue about “market forces” in the guise of a fellow named Hollow Ian. Midway through that interlude, Ka-Spel’s voice takes a turn for the demonic and the music becomes increasingly distorted and wrong-sounding. Unfortunately, it does not quite hold together as well as “Angel,” quickly degenerating into a disjointed and seemingly arbitrary flow of odd found-sound vignettes and snatches of music.

The rest of Festive is even less song-based, alternating between lengthy plunges into brooding ambiance and droning psychedelia and brief interludes of surreality. For the most part, the interludes are interesting, but too short to make a strong impression. “Pink,” for example, is just a loop of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” that gradually morphs into “I’m dreaming of a pink solstice” as it becomes more distorted, echo-heavy, and obsessive. Elsewhere, “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Decade” is a haunted bit of minor key chamber music that sometimes sounds like it being dragged into the pit of hell. 

Obviously, the longer pieces are considerably more substantial, but their flashes of inspiration are a bit more stretched and diluted. “Pagan Place” is the most immediately gratifying of the lot, as its initial collage of woozy music box melodies and children singing is an unusual balance of warm and creepy. Gradually, however, it gets more discordant and impressionistic and the children all disappear to be replaced by a groove that sounds somewhere between Eastern European folk music and prog rock being played backwards. “The Witching Hour,” on the other hand, dispatches with any attempt at a hook at all and plunges wholeheartedly in nearly 25 minutes of fragmented nightmare. It feels like a mash-up of horror movie ambiance and cheap Halloween tapes heard through a heavy fog of drugs. 

The remaining longform pieces are considerably less fractured though, opting instead to quietly sustain a dark mood. In that regard, the quietly simmering and blearily hallucinatory “Seasonal Chill” is a dark horse contender for the real centerpiece of this collection, as it just eerily stretches out for nine minutes of focused and languorous disquiet. The inscrutable closer “Purple” seems to attempt a similar feat, but is just too drifting and understated for its own good: it feels like being trapped instead a festive snow globe where everyone else is dead—ìinitially disorienting and sinister, then increasingly dull and devoid of surprise.

Obviously, the big selling point for this collection is that it makes available five rarely heard and rather anomalous LPD releases. In that regard, it serves its purpose beautifully, even if not all of those EPs quite captured the Dots at the peak of their game. In fact, Festive would be a far better album if it had been aggressively condensed rather than comprehensive and complete. As such, Festive is probably only for completists and fans in love with the band’s more subdued, ambient side. 

While I personally like Festive, it is definitely the sort of album that I would be rather hesitant to recommend to anyone: it is quite a diffuse and exhausting listening experience, as there are plenty of long and meandering lulls between the various flurries of activity. Also, no single  piece manages to stand out as particularly essential within the LPD canon, though there are plenty of cool ideas and flashes of humor strewn about in wait for patient listeners to happen upon them. The emphasis was definitely on spontaneity, fun, and naked experimentation here rather than songcraft or editing. As such, Festive is a perversely non-traditional album that celebrates holiday traditions, as it eschews hooks and cohesiveness and does not hold up well to attentive listening or scrutiny, but does a perfectly fine job of blurring and softening the edges of harsh reality for a couple of hours.

Listen here.

a1667108269_16

Legendary Pink Dots, “Pages of Aquarius” (Metropolis, 2016)

,

The Legendary Pink Dots have been in the midst of a creative renaissance for years now, fitfully releasing some of the finest work of their career amidst the unending and distracting tide of solo projects, reissues, live albums, and archival discoveries. The lion’s share of Edward Ka-Spel’s best ideas, however, have definitely been winding up in LPD’s more abstract and experimental work. I am personally perfectly fine with that, as that is the side of the Dots that I have always preferred anyway. 

I suspect that most longtime fans were initially drawn to the band by their songs though and they have presumably been suffering through quite a long dry spell in that regard. Pages of Aquarius is an album for them, as it is a solid, concise, and hook-heavy collection of industrial-tinged songs that harken back to the Dots of earlier times. In fact, if I did not know better, I would have guessed that this album was recorded in the early ’90s. I am not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but there are a definitely a handful of instant classics here regardless.

For better or worse, the opening “Mirror, Mirror” is a near-perfect song that sets an almost impossibly high bar for the rest of the album. While the distorted power chords definitely feel like a retro-throwback of sorts, the band is nevertheless at the height of their talents, as Edward Ka-Spel’s lyrics are wry and biting; his melodies are strong; the clattering drum programming is unconventional and dynamic; and the more psychedelic touches build the song to a crescendo rather than derailing its momentum. As far as hookiness is concerned, “Mirror” is Aquarius‘s pop zenith and sets the template that most of the following songs try to follow. They may not always succeed, but they all at least fulfill some role in unfolding whatever cryptic narrative arc Ka-Spel has in mind and offer some scattered delights along the way. 

While the album’s lyrical content seems to have a loose and somewhat inscrutable astrological/techno-dystopian theme, the overall thread linking these eight pieces together musically is quite a bit clearer, as there is a definite formula of propulsive drum programming, buzzing synthesizers, memorable hooks, and comparatively tight songcraft running throughout Aquarius—at least for a while, anyway. Things definitely get quite a bit more abstract near the album’s end. 

The star of the show is largely the drum programming though, which simultaneously calls to mind the poppier strains of ’90s industrial while still being lively and unusual enough to elevate the surrounding material. The rolling sex groove of “D-Train” is admittedly a bit much (and certainly does not benefit from an interlude of proggy bombast), but the vaguely Latin rhythm in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” is great and the deeply wrong-sounding lounge groove of “Touching the Forelock” is even more striking.

Of course, the problem is that there are initially not many occasions besides “Mirror, Mirror” in which everything is going well at once. For example, a few songs are derailed by maddeningly insistent sing-song melodies that resemble nursery rhymes (“The Greatest Story” is heavily indebted to “The Alphabet Song”). Elsewhere, Ka-Spel errs on the side of shrillness or the band lets their more indulgent psychedelic impulses overstay their welcome a bit. Nevertheless, Aquarius is ultimately a very listenable and enjoyable album due to its strong rhythmic component, even if it does not scale particularly impressive heights at times. 

There are a handful of notable exceptions though, particularly the understated and slow-burning ballad “Prodigal,” which boasts a great vocal melody, elegantly minimal synth accompaniment, and a dub-wise percussion backdrop of quietly escalating intensity. I am not certain that it needed to stretch out for almost 9 minutes, but it never stops being great, so the extended duration is not a problem at all. The extended three-part closer “Don’t Go There/Page Aquarian/Jacob’s Ladder” is yet another highlight, weaving a simmering and complex groove of burbling percussion; buzzes and beeps; and fake brass before taking a deep and prolonged plunge into far more lysergic territory. 

Again, all of it is great, but the fact that it sprawls out for over 17 minutes might make it a tough sell for those not fully indoctrinated into LPD’s penchant for indulgence. To my ears, it is a journey well-worth taking, as Ka-Spel and company build to quite a wonderful crescendo of mind-warping abstraction mingled with interludes of haunting melody. It is absolutely the perfect way to end the album, but the digital and 2xLP versions toss in yet another kaleidoscopic descent into the rabbit hole of Ka-Spel’s mind in form of the 20-minute “Weight of Water.” Most fans will not want to miss that bonus track, as it is probably substantial enough to have warranted its own EP.

The only real flaw with Pages of Aquarius is just that there is just too damn much of it and that not all of it is wonderful. The presents a problem when all of the best material occurs at the beginning and the end: Aquarius could have been an absolutely perfect album if all of the breezier pieces in the middle had been culled. While almost every song in that lull boasts at least a few things I can appreciate, the cumulative effect is that it is kind of a slog to get to the part of the album where things start to truly catch fire. 

There are certainly far worse problems to have than a massive surplus of fully formed ideas, however, so it would be a shame to dwell on that. Rather, the important thing is that Pages of Aquarius boasts at least three absolutely stellar songs. In fact, I would even say that it is easily one of the Dots’ finest albums, as they are certainly at the peak of both their songwriting and hallucinatory powers. Granted, this absolutely wonderful single album has the editing misfortune of being buried within the format of an exasperatingly overstuffed double album, but that is nothing that a resourceful listener with access to iTunes cannot easily fix.

Listen here.

a1313855271_16

Legendary Pink Dots, “Chemical Playschool Volumes 16 & 18” (Self-Released, 2014)

I am not sure which is more amazing: that the Dots are now up to 18 (sort of) of these weird, free-wheeling, catch-all releases or that they are still occasionally both excellent and surprising. In any case, this double release is quite a fine and rather substantial effort. Like most (if not) all Chemical Playschool entries, this is not the place to come for hooks and tight editing, but Ka-Spel and company’s abstract psychedelia nevertheless blossoms into some very beautiful, strange, and haunting interludes. Anyone looking to completely detach from mundane reality for 90 minutes without the aid of pharmaceuticals would be hard-pressed to find a better option than this one.

Although they almost certainly derive from lots of jamming and improvisation, Chemical Playschool 16′s three lengthy pieces make a very convincing show of seeming deliberate and well-composed. Someone clearly spent an enormous amount of time editing all of these disparate ideas and motifs into a coherent, satisfying arc and it shows. That is not to say that it is tightly structured or economically assembled, as such considerations are beside the point in such a free-floating phantasmagoric dreamscape. 

What matters instead in this case is how seamlessly Ka-Spel and his colleagues flow through their various lysergic synthesizer reveries, brooding ambient passages, quirky grooves, surreal sound collages, and unsettling spoken-word passages. While parts of Volume 16 definitely seem to be treading water creatively at times, it is packed with enough compelling set pieces and wonderful transitions to justify the more static bits. The band has quite a bag of tricks at their disposal, imaginatively interspersing their more standard fare with crackling radio transmissions, mutant sambas, horror-movie organs, and snatches of The Silverman’s musique concrète. My favorite part (as always), however, is Ka-Spel’s macabre poetry, which ephemerally approaches his best work with Part Two’s “The Monsters Take the Fun Away” section.

Appropriately, Volume 18 is no less amorphous and kaleidoscopic, though it differs from Volume 16 by being presented as a single 39-minute piece. Initially, it starts off a bit weaker, however, opening with a druggy, neo-tropical-sounding dirge before morphing into a vista of sputtering, space-y psychedelia and a very trebly, ranting Edward Ka-Spel. Given time though, Ka-Spel and his bandmates successfully plunge deep into the rabbit hole of brain-bending, hallucinatory abstraction once again and never look back (I felt like I was in an alien aviary at one point). 

In fact, I think it may be even better than Volume 16 at making me feel like I am actually having aural hallucinations and that Edward Ka-Spel has creepily infiltrated my head somehow, even though the individual motifs do not seem quite as strong. Maybe that is the secret though—the more shifting, warped, and vaporous the music, the more unreal it all seems. Almost nothing from this half of the album ever sticks around long enough to be remembered, as it becomes essentially a stream of feverish ideas either whooshing by or bubbling to the surface only to be quickly consumed again by the background entropy. Much like Volume 16, however, it fleetingly coheres for yet another mesmerizing and disturbing Ka-Spel monologue masterpiece, this one entitled “The Only Living Doll in the Doll House.” It is a classic.

While this sprawling effort is not exactly flawless, it was never intended to be, as the Chemical Playschool albums are always far more concerned with experimentalism than songcraft. I am perfectly fine with that state of affairs, as I generally prefer their more unhinged and abstract forays to their actual songs. More importantly, the flaws are extremely minor this time around—occasionally a section will be somewhat weak or overstay its welcome a bit, but there is nothing shrill, clumsy, jarring, or jammy to be found. The Dots were certainly not lacking for ideas and do a beautiful job of sequencing and avoiding clichés, repeating themselves, or relying too heavily on their own tropes. For anyone already indoctrinated into LPD fandom and amenable to their occasional indulgences, this is nearly an hour-and-a-half of imaginative, top-shelf psychedelia and my current lead contender for best LPD release of the year.

Listen here.

Load More