2006 marks the quarter century mark for one of the world’s most enduring musical enigmas: The Legendary Pink Dots. The twists, contortions, and genre gyrations the band have traversed over this period are dizzying and often occur in the absence of any grand plan or master philosophy save perhaps that of relentless experimentation within broad pop structures. For this year’s offering, LPD have created a characteristically lushly grim song cycle that both looks simultaneously forward with themes of mortality (the final track is ominously entitled “Your Time Is Up”) and immortality and backwards with a mind to trying to organize the scattershot travels of the last twenty five years into a consistent whole. The irony of assembling a coherent legacy for a band whose badge of honor has been to follow loose threads wherever they took them rather than impose some type of top-down organization should not be lost on anyone, least of all LPD themselves. On Your Children… they let the music and lyrics wander in a leisurely stroll through their eclectic garden.
As usual, LPD operates from multiple centers of strength at once. The first is Edward Ka-Spel’s carefully constructed and delightfully oblique lyrics. Ka-Spel’s by now familiar themes of guilt, alienation, self-doubt, and other forms of social discomfort are densely packed bombs that blossom in the back of your mind. Ka-Spel is a keen observer of human flaws and these are explored both in the context of bewildering divine forgiveness of horrible transgressions (“No Matter What you Do”) and in the more personal spheres of betrayal (“The Island Of Our Dreams”) and neglect (“Bad Hair”). The cruel vagaries of fate often take center stage. In the exemplary “Please Don’t Get Me Wrong”, a tourist ends up in an unnamed Middle Eastern jail for a crime that is never divulged, even to her. Claustrophobic in both its lyrics and arrangement, it is a harrowing journey from a mundane girl’s night out to a hellish arrest and imprisonment. The resulting montage hearkens back to the band’s long form experimentation in their “Chemical Playschool” series. Ka-Spel deftly transposes the grim details of his story onto a larger canvas; the upcoming “trial” is an apt, if mildly Kafka-esque, metaphor for that final interview to enter the pearly gates. When the song creaks to its end in a repeated mantra of “you have no choice”, it is a spine chilling reminder of the futility of resistance in the face of invisible authority.
Musically, LPD navigates waters of synthetic minimalism and full-on rave-up robo-groove with equal assurance, often in the same song (e.g. “The Made Man’s Manifesto”). There’s no sense that any of the songs themselves or the flow of the album in general hew to any pat structure. The gorgeous multi-tracked saxophone intro to the episodic “A Silver Thread” has to contend with spectral shimmers of synthesizer and cymbals to assert its beauty. The fact that it ultimately is swallowed by a sinister cloud of electronics by the middle of the song should not be construed as defeat either. LPD thrives on documenting those brief moments of gorgeous peace that can exist against the most tumultuous of backgrounds. When Ka-Spel’s spoken word vocals finally tell their lonely tale of a depressive’s battle against the all-consuming weight of his malaise, it becomes obvious that this “silver thread” could be all that is connecting him to life itself; it is his mortal coil. Lest one come away with the impression that Your Children… is unrelentingly grim, there is the wonderful flowing entwined bass and sax of “No Matter What You Do”, or “Feathers At Dawn”’s jaunty guitar strum, tuba and violin (what an arrangement!) melting into a simmering flamenco vamp. Joy and sorrow both have a place at the table.
Newcomers to LPD are probably not going to be won over primarily on the strength of this release, but then trying to pin down this band based on one release is akin to reducing a complex organism to a single cell. Sure, the DNA may be present in the cell, but it certainly doesn’t give a complete picture. LPD has been accused of lack of focus in individual releases, but Your Children… does not suffer from that fate. It does what a proper summation should do: it presents a well-formed “state of the band” document while generating enough interest for novices to seek out the genesis of the ideas presented and keeping the fan base enthralled, waiting in rapt attention for the next chapter.
