So Lonely In Heaven is the latest album in The Legendary Pink Dots 45 year career on the outer fringes of acid/space rock alternative universe. I will confess I only know three or four songs by them, so come to this unable to compare it to the band's classic albums. The current line-up are Edward Ka-Spel, Randall Frazer, Erik Drost and Joep Hendrikx.
The album opens with the title track So Lonely In Heaven with a disembodied computer narrator, spacey noises, a sinuous synth pop backing, carefully spoken sung vocals explaining the danger of the situation, they are searching for a partner in the ether, dreaming of omnipotence, that can only come with typewriters filtered through heaven's gate, delivering there message.
The Sound Of The Bell has a heavily layered doom scrolled synth world, agonizing over how big an ark they need to build to give them safe harbour in the maelstrom of disaster that the 2020's are becoming, they wait for the sound of that bell, taking them back to the days before everything went insane to the sounds of those cathedral bells.
Dr. Bliss '25 has a clubby beat for the good Dr. Bliss to do his stuff and make us feel all blissed out and relaxed, to erase thoughts and worries of our modern malaise.
Sleight Of Hand is super slow deep look into the darkness of a world in which Sleight Of Hand has become inescapable, mute trumpet filled with pain of misdirection, bass slower than a snail delicately suggesting a way out from this stasis.
Choose Premium: First Prize has a Krautrock beat, offering you the prize of disappearing and being re-invented somewhere untouched by modern madness, a place similar to the vision offered by the house in the new Netflix drama Cassandra, escaping from the misery into a world envisioned in West Germany in 1973, pulsing insistence surrounded by weird, odd noises from who knows where. When will the machines take over. Leading us to the happy advert of the future outro, elysian fields our panorama.
Darkest Knight they have the deepest bass drone, trying to get far from the stench of that Musk you wear, creating your own enemies when you should have none, the dread and fear that's being brought forth. Screams from beyond the barricades, the other side of an imaginary line, creating crisis that can never be solved, what price your alleged free speech brings, the odd avant noise seemingly caught in the Darkest Knights matrix.
They take us to a modern farm for some Cold Comfort, solace from all the troubles and the madness on the screens surrounding us, wishing to get back to simpler, safer less insane times, wanting less never ending trauma, slow things back down, totally a song for the wild ride we are on, trying to blot it all out, no one wants to see the car crash of our times anymore.
Wired High: Too Far To Fall what else can you do to keep the pain at bay, nagging away at you like the insistent acoustic riff, peril all around, the high wire act to survive, the need to float off into ambient space, before the phasers attack.
How Many Fingers In The Fog is a good question, we all try to see through the fog of the internet and modern media, trying to find some truth, slowly evolving trough ambient washed spaces, no odder than trying to make sense of modern news bulletins, what confessions will our memories bring up next.
Blood Money: Transitional whose blood do we have on our hands today, can you really live without taking a little Blood money every once in a while, are we all guilty of this crime from within the system, semi classical motifs emerge from the bleeping noises, oscillations and guitar lines forging into the light, hoping for a far mystic land, beyond all the suffering, what kind of world machine are we transitioning into from the dark coda.
Pass the accident just keep on moving by, don't look, don't speak about it, certainly don't think too much about all the debris, ruined livers and kidney's who can you sell your body parts off to, will anyone want your heart when your gone, are your eyeballs worth saving, who runs that second hand body part shop, doomed synths wash over us, will our ghost remain within the machine or will it escape through that sinewy guitar solo.
The album closes with the even more doom laden Everything Under The Moon that succinctly sums up how we are currently drowning, in this irritated rotting pustule of despair, the malevolence of people who ought to be creating a creative peaceful utopia, but always take the wrong turn, a final sad lament for the post covid miasma.
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