Forty-five years into their career and even more albums: The Legendary Pink Dots is quite a track to tackle. Fortunately, Edward Ka-Spel offer us regular opportunities to catch the wagon moving, renewing its entourage. So Lonely in Heaven is introduced as their ‘second full-length effort since the World stopped for a Global Pandemic’, as they put it. The tone is set, rather melancholy, like the title: the eternal solitude of the afterlife awaits us. Let's dive right into it!
Let us be guided by Ka-Spel's voice, at once gentle and grating. Jovial, welcoming, disturbing, pessimistic: all these nuances coexist as he draws us into his reveries between primitive industrial music, from a time when it was still a hippies' affair, and avant-garde rock. The spectres of Hawkwind, Pink Floyd or Bowie, only weirder, cross paths. The machines lament: this eternal solitude is that of our souls trapped by a machine that will remember us forever, or rather the image of us that we have frozen for a moment, a pale isolated shadow digested and spat out. The Legendary Pink Dots, despite their penchant for the synthetic, have little love for artificiality and false promises of eternity. La vie en rose is tinged with black.
The result is organic and psychedelic. The narrator's voice is reminiscent of Nivek Ogre, only less monstrous (Ka-Spel also hooked up with cEvin Key, founding Tear Garden together), leading us into a state of mind conducive to reverie. The bells heralding doom on The Sound of the Bell, the piano and spacey synths of Dr Bliss'25, the creeping ironic fever of Choose Premium: First Prize, the hushed mysticism of Cold Comfort, the hypnotic rhythm of Blood Money, the rumbling bass that gives Everything Under the Moon its air of nocturnal cabaret, the orchestral touches and electronics: everything is superimposed and blended with a harmony that sometimes, quite rightly, has fun breaking up. Layers and textures are superimposed and blended. The Legendary Pink Dots caresse our ears while slipping in shadows of anguish, inviting nothingness to the fireside (the opening track's slide into darkness is chilling).
A gentle apocalypse, So Lonely in Heaven is an end-of-the-world poem, a disillusioned cyberpunk dream, a polite cry of resistance whose echoes reverberate and bounce around in a sanitised digital void. Here is a fragment of eternity which, rather than capturing an image at a given moment, contains the soul of its creators. With magnificent subtlety, So Lonely in Heaven is a magic trick, a perfect balancing act, a record that is both terrifying and comforting, sweet and spicy, melancholy but not desperate, timeless yet firmly rooted in its time. Where to start when considering the Legendary Pink Dots' almost fifty albums? Well, why not with this one?
