Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD,Limited 2LP
In his inimitable style, master mythologer and spinner of eerie Millenial tales for The Legendary Pink Dots here presents some further solo efforts. There’s the hissing, steaming clockwork music box of “Supper At J’s” with unsettling reflections on the state of virtual 1999, which rises and falls from song into semi- orchestral concrète-samplescapes as the lead-in for an album which includes the disturbingly groovy “Cause and FX”, with its misguided protagonist with his “cute Colt .45/splits a mole-hill from a mile” and a penchant for saving the world, whether it wants it or not. Edward Ka-Spel knows his psychopaths as well as he knows his lyrical dreamers, and The Blue Room features several of each.
The arrhythmic drum machine and mocking New Ageisms of “A Roman Candle” combines scathing, sardonic half-believed cynicism with a yearning for human warmth ; “Design Fault” manages the astounding trick of pulling a melody from what sounds like “D’y Ken John Peel?” and, through judicous use of echo, plus one of the more stumbling, minimal drum machine patterns and sample loops of recent years, with the poetic, sub-religiose revolutionary nihilism of the lyrics, makes for the best Ka-Spel track since the awesome Tanith and The Lion Tree album. “Hotel Y” has a shuffling, brushed percussion loop and watery, self-despairing lyrics about the end of a relationship which seem to form a good proportion of Ka-Spel’s solo songs, before another extended instrumental suite which moves from upbeat stabs of brassy samples into washes of blanched atmoshpherics and recycled, glitched loops which converge into discordant babel. What refreshes, as ever, is the variety pulled from the keyboards and samplers, the compositional deployment of a distended rattle here, a pulsing loop there and the cunningly peculiar use of vocal and instrumental effects which transform EK’s voice from the hushed tones of an existential coward into the demonic giggle of a maniac within the space of a single song
Sparking emotion and inventive discordia alike, The Blue Room establishes its own self-contained universe, bearing a passing resemblance to the mundane reality, populated by melancholic lovers and vampire suitors, earnest declarations of re-incarnated eternal love to a soundtrack of mellow Jazz and jet engines at take-off; and the guest vocals of Lisa, who provides the stirring title track with both a different voice, and a reference back through Ka-Spel’s past albums and their guests. There’s even “Shall We Share Water Brother?” – which is part Vangelis, and perhaps part Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land if the post-Messianic mood connects to the reference in the song title. Strangely familiar as Ka-Spel’s alternate world maybe, it’s probably best not to live there too long for the sake of sanity- though, compared to the dissapointments of this one, it’s an intriguing place to visit.
-Antron S. Meister-
