The Poppy Variations is the ill-natured twin of The Whispering Wall -- the qlippothic, mirror-universe reflection, residing in the shadowy nightside of Eden. Where Whispering is right in line with LPD's current manifestation and evolution, Poppy is entirely regressive and even transgressive. Where Whispering is often joyful and musically rich, Poppy is spare, prickly and pessimistic. Rather than a series of inviting, accessible compositions, LPD creates a series of perverse spectral enigmas, even utilizing samples and reworkings of their older material, in some attempt at painstaking self-reflection and exegesis. Edward Ka-Spel's lyrics aren't as bemused and detached as usual here, instead, on many of the tracks, he sounds downright miserable, displaying the kind of perplexed mental fragmentation familiar from early Dots material like Asylum. Long sections of near-silence and passages exhibiting the kind of wildly unorthodox experimentation not heard since the Steven Stapleton-produced Malachai: Shadow Weaver part 2 make this album one of LPD's most difficult propositions in recent memory. It's a schizophrenic experience attempting to place this album in context with The Whispering Wall; best, then, to evaluate it on its own merits. Which are many, especially for diehard fans of early Dots (read: freaks of nature) - the jagged, minimal electronics and Ka-Spel's piercing graveyard whine, staccato drum machine rhythms, bizarre samples, loops and low-budget psychedelic touches that contribute to an air of drugged-out bedroom insanity. The hazy, summer buzz of "Krussoe" shifts and festers in the background, as Ka-Spel mutters: "All I have is sand, a withered hand, a pile of cans, they're rusting." More nautical metaphors (see Ka-Spel's Pieces of 8), this time the bedraggled literary castaway wishing for a ship to come and take him away from his tropical hell. Even the song names on The Poppy Variations seem to echo the album's dire outlook: "Personal Monster" and "It Doesn't Matter Anway," a pair of songs that echo early Dots melodies, minimal treatments, up-close vocals explicating the most dreadful futuristic angst. "L'oiseau Rare (Pt. 1 & 2)" begins with wacky jungle-drums and bouncing vocals familiar from "Crumbs on the Carpet," but it quickly segues into a lengthy excursion through enigmatic unfoldings of ambient meandering, lost in a vast interplanetary garbage scow at night. It's as frightening, haunted and lonely as The Tower or parts of Crushed Velvet Apocalypse. An Orson Welles-ish radio drama voice slips out of the aethyr on "The Hot Breath on Your Neck," creepily intoning: "It...is...later...than...you...think....," to which a resigned Ka-Spel replies: "I know, you don't have to rub it in, do you?" Ouch. Things end on a note of spectacularly epic melancholy, with the two-part, 25-minute picaresque musical patchwork of the title track, which uses the classic track "Poppy Day" as a jumping off point for a lengthy meditation on depression and addiction. I've never felt so far away listening to music on my headphones, the track traveling through mental corridors, collecting faded memories and obsessed spirits, ultimately exploding into a massive and sinister soundscape of disembodied voices, radioactive swipes of brain-frying sound, cold metallic insectoid textures and distant, reverberating funereal choruses of bagpipes. In its own twisted, cadaverous way, The Poppy Variations is an even finer accomplishment than The Whispering Wall, a spooked missive from deep in the heart of the abyss. - Jonathan Dean, Brainwashed