Edward Ka-Spel’s brilliance with The Legendary Pink Dots is to introduce us to isolated characters and then immerse us in their world-view through expansive and mysterious soundscapes. He begins with the most restricted, infinitesimal point of consciousness and then slowly expands it outward towards a state of ‘cosmic consciousness’ (to use the phrase of 1960s psychonauts). Musically, he often follows this template of expansion, with simple melody lines repeating and layering in increased complexity of texture. Much of the LPD’s music is an undertaking to help the listener (and perhaps composer) escape his/her own head. Lyrical phrases, musical motifs, album titles and themes recur across decades, but tonal shifts between albums are slow and subtle. Hopefully, The Legendary Dots Project, like the Residents and Sparks projects before, will provide the keen reader and listener with a giddy entry-point into the Legendary Pink Dots’ musical world. Fulfil the prophecy!
So Lonely in Heaven
Tom: So Lonely in Heaven provides chronicles of chronic dread, past, present and future. Better to face it than avert your gaze. I’ve listened to it many times this month; it seems apt that I’m writing my review when not just experiencing a cold, but the dolorous fug of a January cold.
‘So Lonely in Heaven’ has an archetypal LPD chord progression; stupendous wistful melancholy accompanies Ka-Spel crying out against our outsourcing ourselves to technological devices, detachment from the environment and loneliness.
‘The Sound of The Bell’ indicts cultural infantilism of those who have given up making decisions for themselves. Easy meat for a Biblical Ark, into space, via Mao and Musk. Pray to the server, to the cloud. The world Ka-Spel was born into where cradle to grave Welfare State provision was at least a partial reality. Now, continuing to be torn up. A new Labour government slowing the process, at best, not even considering reversing it.
‘Dr. Bliss ’25’ opens with almost house piano, for a distinctly unheimlich Huxleyean tale of pacification through pleasure, spread by the titular doctor. Like the previous track, appreciated video game synths are evocative of the era the Dots got going. This album feels like being immersed in a less interactive, but more relevant, narrative than that of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) [ed. which looks to have a sequel coming out this year].
The slow, dank ‘Sleight of Hand’ feels like the weight of deadening zero-hour contracted labour, not just sucking the life out of you but foreclosing your future. A Touch of Frost (1992–2010) saxophone drifts around; reversed psychedelic sounds intercede; this track melds Tarot card dread with utterly everyday exploitation.
‘Choose Premium : First Prize’ is faster, ruminative on “new identities”, we’re in The Tower (1984), or Carl Neville’s Resolution Way (2016). The customer who’s always right. Crushed by the wheels of the tech bros’ ‘industry’. “Be a winner!” The gamification of life and paying Pennsylvania electors for their vote. After an avant-garde collapse into glitchy machine nullity, at 4:36 a Casio organ, MIDI enlarged magical roundabout melody unfurls: evoking victories too good to be true, or just.
‘Darkest Knight’ lumbers in with uneasy, lavish guitar and washes of sustained synth. Speaking of passion and joy are forbidden. I love the expansiveness of the dreamlike music in the final section after 3 minutes; Popol Vuh in a false Valhalla.
‘Cold Comfort’ feels like certain early Dots in its pared-down melancholia. It evokes bedsit solitude and loneliness, which also inevitably evokes the uneven experiences of COVID lockdowns. There’s a sense of bleak enclosure and turning in on yourself, but “still, we love” and the song’s earlier Brian Wilson reference about not being “made for these times” resounds.
‘Wired High : Too Far to Fall’ begins as LPDs unplugged, with a thicket of foggy instruments gradually joining. This tense dreamy tale of deja-vu and flying becomes Mellotron-tastic, with sound effects suggesting ‘Plastic Palace People‘. The soundscape that emerges as the finale evokes 1967 Beatles and 1974 Peter Hammill working on a 2025 horror film soundtrack.
‘How Many Fingers in the Fog’ doesn’t initially grab me as much as some here, but then the glistening organ expands, in what is later revealed to be the chorus: “Give me back the power” and unless I’m mistaken, “Give me back the Tower…”
‘Blood Money : Transitional’ has notably economic, material insights: connecting the marketplace, “savagery”, the public eye and meat eating. Tremendous simple spiralling arpeggios, and then grave synth strings. One of the album highlights is secured by another of many late flourishes: clockwork music box and mallets metamorphose into a glistening Steve Reich minimalist cycle, followed by an ominous string ostinato.
‘Pass The Accident’ is a disarmingly direct meditation on the human body, parts and whole, and the soul and being part of another’s history. To me, this summons the evocative phrase Frankenstein’s human: a person stitched together through many organ donations. Kept going by medical science and cradle-to-grave socialised healthcare, an organised system which also relies on donors’ individual altruism.
‘Everything Under The Moon’ beckons us into a Lynchian backlot. Mellotron and synth vibraphone. References to “drilling” and the cruelty of masters. This bleak conclusion of terminal imprisonment seems the logical allegorical response to current events, with humans increasingly viewing Other groups as expendable factory fodder at best. “There’s no space for sympathy, or the flock”. Musk’s technological individualist Nazism won’t provide a space for flocks of any kind, even those currently acting as pawns. Whether Trump’s long-term shift to Fascism is adequately opposed in and outside the US, remains the moot point. Acquiescence with bullies, trying to flatter or win them over, never ends well.
This album provides an unfurling, enveloping, spacious listen compared to the excellent, but far more frenetic feeling The Museum of Human Happiness (2022). It breathes analogue, augmented by the judicious digital trickster. It does not surprise me that this album marked a return to face-to-face musical collaborations by the band members.
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Adam: It may be asinine, even bromidic, to assert that the world has become more like that prophesied for decades in the Dots’ music, but sadly that does not prevent it from being true. Perhaps this is simply the concept of the Terminal Kaleidoscope in action, with Ka-Spel reflecting recently in conversation with OutsideLeft Music magazine, “Way, way, back in the early days I used to say a lot about ‘The Terminal Kaleidoscope’, a concept comparing the fragile planet we live on to a drowning human being with life flashing before his or her eyes, the images constantly accelerating. It’s 2024, a little over two decades since the turn of this unbearably turbulent century and the concept appears to have become an unlikely soap opera where we are the cast”. Indeed, the militaristic fascism of The Tower (1984) and Island of Jewels (1986) – undergirded by Thatcherite neoliberalism – has metastasized into a techno-feudalism that was present in the music of those albums, with their liturgical-industrial style that sounded like a demonic sex party of Wall Street bankers in a Medieval scriptorium! To the degree that the lyrics of the Dots’ newest album So Lonely in Heaven (2025) tread well-trodden paths, that only speaks to how eerily prescient Ka-Spel has been in his concerns. Themes of surveillance were present in Asylum‘s ‘Echo Police’ (1985), rogue AI on Hallway of the Gods‘ ‘Mekkanikk’ (1997), environmental overshoot on Crushed Velvet Apocalypse‘s doomer anthem ‘Just a Lifetime’ (1990). However, Ka-Spel and his band have not grown complacent; musically this is a fascinating, heady experience; lyrically, Ka-Spel unifies the political-materialist and esoteric-spiritualist registers that previous Dots albums have vacillated between.
Immediately, it is apparent this is a strong album, with the departure of Phil Knight/ The Silverman seemingly leaving the band’s confidence undented. While this speaks to the clarity of Ka-Spel’s vision, it also stands as a testimony to the ability of Randall Frazier, Erik Drost and Joep Hendrikx to handle the Terminal Kaleidoscope, adding their own colours to the mix, assimilating their musicianship into the weft and warp of the Dots’ long-established sonic palette!
A stern Thatcherite vocal sample opens the album alongside some techno-burbling, announcing with expressed that the human subject – indeed, the listener herself – is now “surplus to requirements”. However, the wistful guitar playing that follows is indisputably human, as is the melancholy in Ka-Spel’s voice as he sings, “The programmes wrote programmes which programmed the fall/ The subtle decline, a drain of the pool”. While the concerns here seem to be the same as those expressed by the San Francisco Bay Area tech bros and readers of Astral Codex Ten (namely the future existential risk of artificial general intelligence, which Effective Altruists pour millions of dollars into avoiding, rather than dealing with the present catastrophe of climate change) Ka-Spel approaches the topic from more of a William Blakean than a utilitarian perspective. Indeed, the song’s lyrics suggest that such a prophesised end to humanity would be due to utilitarian-rationalism itself, especially the human desire to endlessly calculate and tabulate, like the businessman in Le Petit Prince (1943) who wishes to count up all the stars so that he can own them all. Musically the song stages a dizzying dialectic between lush circling synths (which seem to reflect and refract the central guitar melody) and anxiously buzzing electronic pulses and stabs. Indeed, ‘The Sound of the Bell’ only amplifies the latter, with more aggressive burbling, menacing electric guitar and pneumatic-sounding percussion, which give way to mordantly nightmarish synths. Lyrically the song works as an usually straightforward critique of algorithmic capitalism, with lines like “Pray to the server, to the cloud/ That oils the wheels and sticks around/ Ensures we never misbehave/ From Cradle to grave” reading like a condensation of a thousand Cory Doctorow blog posts.
While these opening two tracks are clearly songs in a fairly traditional sense – rather than soundscapes as per Chemical Playschool 11, 12 and 13 (2001) – my brain still slips off the melodies, so that after listening to them I can barely remember what the songs sounded like. ‘Dr. Bliss ’25’, by contrast, begins with what Tom accurately describes as “almost house piano”, making the opening of the track as memorable as a Pet Shop Boys banger from the 1990s. The track remains a little spacey and less propulsive than I would have loved, but it creeps into the ears nicely. Dr. Bliss sounds like a goodly anaesthetist, more Stuart Hameroff than Professor Pyg. If the removal of pain is the removal of suffering – and thus the very stuff of life itself – then Dr. Bliss might also be compared to Dr. Anastasia Dark, the protagonist of The Residents‘ recent album Dr. Dark (2025).
‘Sleight of Hand’ is a trifle slow-key and mordant following the more densely layered and immediately involving opening three tracks, but it is possessed of a noirish ambience that is pleasing to lose yourself within for a few minutes. It is in the final minute of the following track, ‘Choose Premium : First Prize’ that the album really kicks into gear for me, however. I will admit that this is because an ELP-like gameshow tune interspersed with noises that recall Brian Eno’s Microsoft sounds is very precisely my jam. I haven’t had so much fun since listening to ‘Kitto’ on Faces in the Fire (1984)!
It is unusual that the middle section of an album is its peak, but for me that is true of So Lonely in Heaven. ‘Darkest Knight’ is one of those thrumming, throbbing, buzzing Dots albums that sound deeply profound even while the specific meanings of the lyrics remains obscure. The opening lyrics which ask “What makes you so angry” combined with the title ensure that my brain stubbornly insists on taking the song as being addressed to Batman. The song is, perhaps, more effective if Batman is substituted in one’s imagination for, say, Jordan Peterson or Steve Bannon, with lines critiquing an individual who, identifying a “crisis” and “enemies”, claims to have credentials for naming (nailing?) what’s involved. It’s a gorgeously sequenced track, with a fuzzy production that reminds me of R.E.M.’s Monster (1994) or even My Bloody Valentine‘s quieter moments.
While the next track, ‘Cold Comfort’, is relatively sparse and straightforward, it’s probably my favourite track on the album, recalling ‘Golden Dawn’ from Asylum, ‘The Shock of Contact’ from Island of Jewels and ‘The Island of Our Dreams’ from Your Children Placate You from Premature Graves (2006) in being intimately addressed in inclusive first person [‘our’ and ‘we’] to some unspecified partner or lover of the narrator. Edward always pulls of this trick so that it pulls uncomfortably at the heart strings. Here the lines “Cold comfort when we both feel scared/ Cold comfort from the screen/ We’re just not made for these times/ Cold comfort from our dreams” followed later by the spoken words “Close the curtains” speaks to the temptation to hunker down in these difficult times, retreating from the rising tide of fascism like two hermit crabs pressed together in their shells.
Musically, ‘Cold Comfort’ also achieves the singular Dots trick of somehow sounding both murky and crystalline all at once. This is also true of the moody and evocative ‘How Many Fingers in the Fog’, but before that we have the acoustic ditty ‘Wired High : Too Far To Fall’, a Dots track of the kind previously anthologised in the 2003 collection A Guide To The Legendary Pink Dots Vol. 1: The Best Ballads. Both tracks are low-key growers that demand the kind of attention that many of us find [disturbingly!] hard to summon up post-Covid lockdowns. It’s also worth noting that I am yet to listen to the album on headphones, which can sometimes be transformative when listening to the Dots. Finally, there is a slight reggae hint to the start of ‘How Many Fingers’, which I wish the band had leaned more into, with more harmonics!! But I’m perverse like that.
‘Blood Money : Transitional’ is my favourite title on the album, with Ka-Spel singing wryly about geopolitical skullduggery. Unexpectedly there’s a classic Portishead vibe to the track, which I really dig. It has an ambience of what I’m going to call vaporwave film noir… you need to play the wonderful Paradise Killer (2020) to get what I mean, probably! Anyway, it’s easily the coolest track on the album and goes into a wind-chime gamelan direction at the end before subsiding into sinister strings and a weird bubbling noise (and then back into the gamelan!) The whole thing is very strange, trippy and addictive.
On a surface level ‘Pass the Accident’ shares lyrical concerns with the critically panned 2008 Will Smith vehicle Seven Pounds in which Will Smith’s character accidentally kills seven people in a car accident he caused and so decides to donate seven parts of himself (lung; liver; kidney; bone marrow; his home; eyes; heart) to atone. Ka-Spel’s account is, of course, much more metaphorical and less much emotionally manipulative. However, since I might be about to donate a kidney (!) it currently makes me feel a little woozy and wobbly to listen to. I shall return to it after the donation! (P.S. I have not killed anyone like Will Smith).
Last but not least, ‘Everything Under the Moon’ is a low-key sinister dirge with a slow tempo and horn-like drones. Since since death in January my mind has been taken up with recollection of the works of David Lynch. This eerie track would fit one of his soundtracks perfectly and marks an elegiac end to a fine, intriguing album.