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 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.
