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Legendary Pink Dots

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Legendary Pink Dots, “The Gethsemane Option” (Metropolis, 2013)

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To the casual observer, it probably seems like either Edward Ka-Spel or The Legendary Pink Dots release (or re-release) an album just about every other week these days, but there has not actually been a major new LPD album since 2010’s oft-brilliant Seconds Late for the Brighton Line. While The Gethsemane Option does not quite measure up to that illustrious predecessor, it still boasts enough high points to make serious fans fairly happy. Less serious fans probably only need to hear a few of the better pieces, but it is clear that Ka-Spel and company set out to deliver a coherent, deliberately sequenced album-sized dose of their signature skewed psychedelia and that its shortcomings are mostly the result of over-ambition.

Appropriately enough, given their new home of Metropolis Records, “A Star is Born” opens the album on a brooding, quasi-industrial note, mixing a muted drum-machine groove, somber synthesizers, space-y studio tricks, creepily evocative lyrics, and sporadic bursts of static and noise to create a haunted and hallucinatory pop gem. Initially, that impressive momentum continues unabated with “The Garden of Ealing,” as it appealingly begins with squelching electronic percussion and an effectively enigmatic and surreal collage of movie/TV samples. Gradually, it coheres into what is almost yet another fine song, as Ka-Spel’s melody and lyrics are both quite strong and the underlying music maintains a nicely simmering degree of muted mindfuckery.

Unfortunately, the album’s first signs of bloat and indulgence start to appear as well and they become an increasingly distracting issue as the album progresses, mostly manifesting themselves in meandering, overlong songs; over-the-top vocals; lengthy improvised passages; curiously dated textures; and rare instances of very ill-conceived lyrics. Those shortcoming are doubly exasperating on this particular album because they are mingled with so many strong ideas and sustained bursts of inspiration.

As a result, most of these songs are mixed successes, but there are a couple of very low lows that I cannot even listen to all the way though, particularly the sing-song major key melody of “Esher Everywhere,” which is additionally torpedoed by some ’80s rock guitar soloing and very ’70s prog synth noodling. Equally misbegotten is the closing “One More Dimension,” which clocks in at nearly ten minutes and painfully devotes much of its running time to Ka-Spel counting dimensions and clumsily, pointlessly rhyming (“Just two more dimensions, too many now to mention”).

“One More Dimension” aside, however, the second half of The Gethsemane Option is actually fairly strong. For example, the throbbing “Grey Scale” boasts some wonderful experimental weirdness in its periphery, along with some delightfully cryptic and paranoid-sounding Ka-Spel stream-of-consciousness and a woozy theremin. The propulsively buzzing, grinding, and burblingly psychotropic “A Stretch in Time” scores yet again, offering up some instrumental passages that easily rank among LPD’s best. 

Still another high point is the 11-minute “Pendulums,” which is basically just Ka-Spel delivering a very creepy, unnerving monologue over the slow pulse of a heartbeat and a deep clock chime. It is marred somewhat by both its running time and some quizzical choices in synthesizer textures, but Edward is utterly magnetic when he is at his spoken-word best and the bed beneath him is the perfect foil for his storytelling (and for the gently roiling and whooshing maelstrom of spaciness that follows it).

Despite those successes (roughly half the album), The Gethsemane Option is ultimately a mild disappointment to my admittedly pessimistic ears, but it is a complicated one and my expectations were perhaps unreasonably high given the heights that some of LPD’s recent work has reached (particularly The Creature That Tasted Sound and The Silverman’s Finisterre). 

There was definitely no shortage of inspiration or vision for this album, as nearly every song boasts a few excellent motifs and it all seems to flow together as a cryptically connected whole, but the band definitely had a hard time actually shaping all those ideas into great songs: only “A Stretch in Time” and “A Star is Born” manage to make it all the way through their running time without succumbing to the band’s more eccentric and indulgent tendencies. Of course, those tendencies are an inherent and essential part of the Dots’ aesthetic, playing as much a role in their distinctiveness and success as they do in their missteps. Some other LPD albums certainly strike a more favorable balance of those extremes, but The Gethsemane Option is still mostly a fine effort.

Listen here.