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Legendary Pinks Dots

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Legendary Pink Dots, “Chemical Playschool 25” (Self-Released, 2025)

There is not a hell of a lot of background information about this latest installment of the Dots’ long-running Chemical Playschool series other than the fact that it was recorded in 2025 and will eventually have a double vinyl release. Fortunately, anyone who has been following LPD’s career for a while will know exactly what to expect: a deep and eclectic dive into free-form psychedelia, promising song fragments, and wherever the hell else the band feels like throwing into the mix.

This one is an especially solid entry to the beloved series, however, as the aforementioned song fragments are quite a strong batch. That said, they are fragments, so the primary appeal of this album lies in shapeshifting and kaleidoscopic fantasia of the overall journey. While the fleeting glimpses of great songs can be teasingly exasperating at times (as always), I love the current uncluttered aesthetic of (mostly) just surf-damaged dreampop guitars, propulsive drum machine grooves, and vocals (albeit still with plenty of trippy sounds perpetually bleeding in from the periphery, of course)

For the most part, every single piece on Chemical Playschool 25 follows a very similar trajectory that begins with a moody or simmering song built from little more than Edward Ka-Spel’s vocals, a dubby drum pattern, and a melodic guitar motif from Erik Drost. At a certain point, however, the “song” bit either implodes, dissolves, or becomes enveloped in a swirl of psychedelic electronics, backwards melodies, hallucinatory samples, and field recordings.

Sometimes the song will eventually re-emerge from that lysergic maelstrom and sometimes it will not, but there is always the kernel of a legitimately cool and catchy song at the heart of these pieces. I suppose one could reasonably argue that the band is endlessly repeating the same trick, but the magic lies in the details and there is more than enough sonic richness and imagination on display to imbue each piece with its own distinctive character (especially on headphones, which are damn near essential for total immersion in these complexly layered psychotropic collages).

The sole exception to that template is the closing 16-minute epic “It Always Happens In 3s,” which is an endlessly shifting rabbit hole of hallucinatory abstraction that covers everything from Kraftwerk-esque early techno to nightmarish dark ambiance to weird mutant party grooves (with horns!).

Aside from that impressively bananas tour de force, my favorite piece is “Trans Siberian,” which notably inverts the template by evolving from a drifting nightmare-scape into a wonderfully melancholy “pop” gem with a twangy “Personal Jesus”/”Never Tear Us Apart”-style guitar hook and an unexpected bed of Mellotron-sounding flutes. Elsewhere, “My Doppelganger” and “Quarantine Machine” are a pair of like-minded highlights built from squelchy drum machine grooves and tremolo-woozy, delay-enhanced surf guitar chords.

“Spotless” is yet another gem, as it departs from the album’s template with a bouncy, piano-driven groove. That said, the allure of individual songs is not quite the point here, as this album is best enjoyed as an extended immersive plunge into deep psychedelia. Experienced thusly, the entire album is a delight, as fresh and imaginative motifs are continually bubbling to the surface (such as the tropical/exotica groove in “Monstera Mash”).

While I have faded in and out of LPD fandom over the years for varying reasons, there are a few facets to this project that I absolutely love that can be exclusively channeled through the mind of Edward Ka-Spel. For one, he can be an absolute psych-pop genius when he sets his mind to it (see Tear Garden’s “Romulus and Venus”). Naturally, I am huge fan of his unsettling monologues as well (The Creature That Tasted Sound, the holiday singles), but I am also a huge fan of a well-crafted Chemical Playschool-style plunge into all-enveloping free-form mindfuckery and this latest opus hits the mark nicely for me. Guitarist Erik Drost is probably this album’s MVP as the melodic guiding force, but I was quite struck by the elegant craftsmanship apparent in all of the various song fragments as well.

The fragments may be brief, but they are beautifully edited and tightly composed while they last and both the beats and omnipresent psychotropic intrusions tend to be quite inspired as well. I have no idea how well this stacks up against every other installment of this series, as I don’t have 20+ hours to reassess its predecessors, but Chemical Playschool 25 is one hell of a satisfying and substantial release by any measure.

Listen here.

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Legendary Pinks Dots, “The Seismic Bleats of Quantum Sheep” (Abstrakce, 2016)

The strongest Legendary Pink Dots album of 2015 snuck in just under the wire as a digital release, with a delayed vinyl version expected in a few months from new Spanish label Abstrakce. Intended as a “secret” sister album to the earlier Five Days, Quantum Bleats sounds a lot more like the work of an actual band, though it is no less fragmented and hallucinatory. Everything feels a lot more deliberate, melodic, fully formed, and evocative this time around: there are a number of beautifully orchestrated passages, snatches of playful cabaret, and muscular bass lines lurking amidst all of the usual free-form psychedelic sprawl. While it probably focuses a bit too much on the ambiguous no-man’s land between “song” and “abstract experimentation” to rank among the Dots’ best work, it is nevertheless quite clear that most of Edward Ka-Spel‚Äôs more inspired recent ideas found their way here.

Curiously, Ka-Spel has described this album as “as far out as the Dots may have gone in their history.” In one way, that statement seems quite far from the mark, given the existence of truly bizarre past albums like The Creature That Tasted Sound or the Chemical Playschool series. In another, however, Seismic Bleats is indeed a legitimately unhinged affair, so maybe the statement just warrants an asterisk with the qualification “at least, as far as song-based albums are concerned.” 

That, said “song-based” might also warrant an asterisk as well, as only one piece fully emerges from the kaleidoscopic fantasia to make a strong impression: the fun, lurching cabaret of “Checkpoint,” which unexpectedly dissolves into a sample of an old waltz after only about two minutes. The opening “Colonel Sanders” veers similarly close to being an instant classic, marrying a cool bass line with a strong vocal melody amidst spacey washes of synthesizers. Again, however, things fail to progress in a conventionally satisfying linear fashion, as the song is warped and distended into near-unrecognizability around the 3-minute mark. It feels a lot like Jamaican dub filtered through the prism of Edward Ka-Spel’s deviant mind, as recognizable bits keep surfacing from the original fully formed song, but everything else is generally replaced entirely or dissolves into vapor.

In general, the appeal of Seismic Bleats lies primarily in just waiting around to see what surfaces next from the bleary miasma of psychedelic wanderings. Surprises definitely abound, as “Checkpoint” alone features chirping birds, wildly pitch-shifted vocals, something that sounds like a field recording from a Russian train platform, and the aforementioned foray into ballroom dance and none of it sounds at all out of place. Soon after, a haunting tambura solo gradually dissolves into a thunderstorm, bringing the first side of the album to a close. 

The second side then kicks off with a piece that initially sounds like a menacing twist on classic Pink Floyd (“Quantum Leap”), but that naturally collapses into a black void of howling cosmic horror and a deep, echoing mantra (which I believe is also being played backwards). Once that happens, things basically stay that way: the first side of the album is devoted to far more tender, human fare and a cavalcade of small surprises, while the second side is almost entirely a dark, haunted, and sustained plunge into deep space, though it does feature an unexpected interlude of something resembling steel drums. To their eternal credit, “Stanley Kubrick meets a resort vacation in Trinidad” is a description that I probably would not get to use for any other band besides the Dots.

Despite being quite different, there is a weird symmetry to the two sides of the album. The first half feels like a wildly unpredictable and jumbled dream where each fresh batch of synapse firings takes me out of where I was and drops me somewhere else. While undeniably dream-like in the extreme, it is definitely not a coherent one (even by dream logic’s very loose standards). The second half also feels like a dream, but like a dream that a broken computer in an abandoned space ship might be having. Or perhaps one that a quantum sheep might be having. It is hard to say. The one thing for certain is that it is all spectacularly warped and that it all ends in brilliantly sublime fashion (with Ka-Spel repeatedly intoning “up the river…down the river” over a bed of burbling water and eerie electronic washes and drones). 

This is definitely a very ambitious and intermittently fascinating work, albeit far from a perfect one. That said, Seismic Bleats’ faults seem to be completely by design: none of the best parts ever stick around long enough to be satisfying or leave a strong impression because everything is gleefully stretched, broken, pulled apart, or otherwise warped in service of Ka-Spel and company’s larger vision. I just wish that the lulls between the best parts were a little more infrequent (and shorter). Oh well. I cannot complain all that much though, as I would much rather hear an inspired near-miss than anything familiar: this is a fine and deeply aberrant album and it is all the more enjoyable because it goes so far off the rails rather than merely revisiting well-worn LPD territory.

Listen here.