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The Legendary Pink Dots, "Your Children Placate You From Premature Graves"
The Dots have always been good at exploring the liminal borderlands between structure and abstraction, between dream and waking life, between nightmare and whimsy. The band's music always has one foot resting on each side, and they are not afraid to dance for extended periods on one side or the other. This album seems to synthesize a lot of the band's previous approaches: crepuscular nightmare monologues, extended noise jams, chugging electronics, twisted fairy tales, orchestral passages, surrealistic cut-up sequences and druggy excursions into nebulous Qlippothic realms.
Your Children Placate You From Early Graves sounds like a classic LPD album right from the start, with the atmospheric opener "Count On Me;" the sound of a jeering mob serves as a foil for Silverman's reverberating piano prelude; and a dialogue snippet of a helpful therapist asking: "Did you suffer nightmares?Are you able to tell us what it is you have nightmares about?"This brief track segues into the first proper track on the album, "No Matter What You Do," a typically indescribable Pink Dots rock hybrid: hash-filtered dub beats, blankets of noise guitar, layers of synthesized drones and chirping electronic effects, Ka-Spel's heavily processed vocal mantra: "We are so unworthy of his endless mercy."Then it's into heavy prog territory, everything combining into a warm, atmospheric fog of dense psychedelic texture, Niels Van Hoorn's trademark saxophone crying out in the chaos, carving out lines in the thick loam that are quickly swallowed up in the maelstrom.
Your Children has the advantage of being relatively economical in length, and being the only album of new material being released before the tour.Past years have seen the group spreading themselves a bit thin, with two new albums being released simultaneously, often with a couple Ka-Spel solo albums thrown in for good measure.By concentrating on creating nine substantive, well-written and dynamic Dots songs, the group benefits tremendously, and there is nary a wasted moment on the album.
Ka-Spel tackles a lot of familiar lyrical themes: questions of faith, freedom, war and destiny in the postmodern age of alienation.The album's title seems to suggest a heavy political bent, and this is not a red herring.On "Please Don't Get Me Wrong," for instance, Middle Eastern troubles are extra-geographically evoked with Arabic and Indian flavored psychedelia, Ka-Spel's lyrics narrating a frightening tale of military arrest and summary execution, punctuated with the repeated phrase "You have no choice," which bounces around the stereo channels exactly like the middle section of 10CC's "I'm Not in Love."This leads directly into "Peace of Mind," which seems to be a direct continuation of the previous song, with Ka-Spel's futile hopes for a peaceful resolution once again taking the political and making it all too personal.
There are some surprising moments on the album, like the theremin solo which comes out of nowhere on the whimsical "Feathers At Dawn," or the moment when the beautiful psych-folk of "The Island of our Dreams" suddenly fades out into eerie inorganic drones.The de rigeur ambient noise and spoken-word track makes it appearance here with "A Silver Thread," which begins in Lynchian territory, hypnotic mutations and overdubs of Van Hoorn's sultry saxophone weaving through dark, ominous alleyways of Alan Splet-esque drones and low-end electronic shudders, distorted voices, rain-slicked city streets and passing sirens.Towards the end of the track, Ka-Spel chimes in with a sardonic monologue that is both sullen and hilarious: "Out of body, but I don't like what I see/Find it hard to take what I hover above/And a little voice says that I should get out more/Maybe pick up some DVDs from the library and cry with the stars discreetly in my own surroundings/Pick the scene that moves me the most and play it again and again."
Playing my most beloved LPD albums for various friends and lovers over the years, I've learned the hard way that some people will just never warm up to the Dots.There's something about the band's amiguous and amorphous musical style, or Ka-Spel's peculiar accent and vocal delivery, or the band's willful eclecticism, or the perceived associations with underground gothic rock, or those who fear anything even hinting at progressive rock, or maybe something else entirely makes it impossible for LPD to penetrate beyond their loyal and bizarrely heterogeneous cult following.I can only speculate as to the reasons why they don't strike a chord with others, because I have always loved their music, and count a few of their albums as among my favorites of all time.Listening to the penultimate track on Your Children, "The Made Man's Manifesto," I was suddenly filled with memories of countless Dots shows past, late-night lava-lamp-lit listening sessions, the thrill of cracking open new LPD and EKS albums over the years, and the strange admixture of the predictably nostalgic and the wholly new that each successive album never fails to provide.
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