Like many of the best things in life, the Legendary Pink Dots are a mystery. At least, it’s a mystery how come they’re still so criminally obscure, when not only have they been releasing awesome music for a good thirty years now, they also have tunes and a fanbase who tend to verge on the obsessively evangelical side of things. They straddle genres like a post-modernist doing the MC Hammer dance over an ADD sufferer’s iPod, with everything from industrial to pop, from jazz to space rock, from folk to dub being dragged into Edward Ka-Spel and co’s music factory, later to emerge from the crystal chimneys as beautifully majestic music. Sometimes they’re scary as fuck, sometimes the most soothing music you ever heard, sometime heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious. But they are never anything less than The Legendary Pink Dots, which is a really fucking great thing to be. And the departure of core member Niels Van Hoorn doesn’t seem to have stopped them.
Edward Ka-Spel is blessed with the kind of voice that, kind of like David Tibet’s but without sounding anything like it, can go from “so frail you’re scared the music will blow it away, even in the quiet passages” to full-on primal screaming at the drop of a tab. Pink Dots albums always start off EPIC. Well, with an epic track, at any rate. This time it’s “Russian Roulette,” which, like all the best epics, itself starts small and ends with howling into the void, this time over some nicely old-fashioned electronics, the kind of Gristley stuff of which I’m sure the late-lamented Peter Christopherson would have approved. Musically, this is at the more electronic end of their range, though there are plenty of “real” instruments to satisfy people who draw the distinction. Though why twats like that should be pandered to is anyone’s guess. That said, it’s not tokenism on the Dots’ part, just an opportunity for me to make that dig at twats. Like Einstürzende Neubauten, another awesome band now beginning their fourth decade without having gone shit, the Dots will use whatever sound is appropriate for the occasion.
More than anything, a Pink Dots album is like an anthology of short stories, possibly written by some marvellous hybrid of J G Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K Dick, lurching from suburban nightmare to absurdist whimsy to experimental philosopy and back again without breaking a sweat. To continue this already-tortuous analogy, it’s actually more like a comic of that anthology, with the art by someone like Frank Quitely (whose technique Grant Morrison, who’d probably also be writing for that anthology – are you still following this? – once famously described as being that he doesn’t just draw single images, he imagines an entire three-dimensional space and draws a detail of it). Basically, what I’m trying to say is that Ka-Spel tells stories and breathes life into their characters, while he and the rest of the band (here mostly co-founder Phil Knight AKA The Silverman and long-term soundscaper Raymond Steeg) create the worlds for them to happen in and occupy through the music. It’s kind of immersive. Though it might share a title with a (similarly awesome) Monster Magnet song, “Radiation Day” is nothing like its namesake. What could have been a nice little acoustic-led number with some unsettling lyrics is transformed, through the use of some amazing electronics and production, including some AWESOME distortion and what sounds like a helicopter full of bees, into an aural nightmare. Again, this is their genius- the sound is what the song needs, and the song is what the sound needs. Everything fits together perfectly while Edward chants “drown in all that beauty” as if nobody, and simultaneously everybody, is listening. It’s also at the darker end of the Dots spectrum, though we do get some whimsicality on “Someday,” even though it’s ripe with the promise of inevitable despair. That’s not to say it’s a depressing album, just a dark one. Albeit a darkness that’s filled with cosmic wonders, he said, adjusting his hippie wig (which, ironically, they aren’t selling in Woolworths. Or anything else, really).The album includes, inexplicably enough, a reworking of “Hauptbahnhof,” from their 1989 release The Legendary Pink Box, which was, appropriately enough, legendary, pink, and also a box. Inexplicable though it may be, it’s as welcome as an old friend, and as novel as an old friend wearing an awesome new hat. Actually, the Pink Box is quite a good reference for the overall tone of Seconds Late for the Brighton Line, though it doesn’t share the Box‘s relative minimalism, having some truly splendid soundscapes going on for Edward to weave his magic over, or rather through.
True story – this album is called Seconds Late for the Brighton Line. A few years ago, I went to see The Legendary Pink Dots in (here it gets a bit spooky) [post=”legendary-pink-dots-live” text=”Brighton”], and (brace yourselves – this is where it gets SERIOUSLY weird) missed my train home. Admittedly, I was about half an hour late, not seconds, and it was actually the London line, not the Brighton line, but… makes you think, eh? Eh? …OK, maybe it doesn’t.
The album sure as shit will, though.
-Deuteronemu 90210, who could be a space captain if he just closed his eyes-
