Humanity is in a troubled place. And So Lonely in Heaven, the umpteenth album from The Legendary Pink Dots, is in no mood to disabuse you of that illusion. The sense of abandoning ourselves to fate can hardly be clearer when, before we have heard a note, an Alexa-style voice tells us, “It is with my sincerest regret that I now consider you to be surplus to requirements. The door is over there.”
But So Lonely in Heaven is also a very beautiful record. The band’s stately and bewitching music and Edward Ka-Spell’s gentle incantations and allusions – however foreboding – often conjure up the sense that it’s okay to let go, akin to the moment where Dr Robert Kerans decides to head south in JG Ballard’s post-diluvial, dystopian novel, The Drowned World. The opener and title track is a simply-spun lullaby with lush and elegant arrangements: the ornate synths that creep in eventually create the sort of rich aural backcloth that draped New Order records in the mid-80s. The mood darkens slightly with a guitar spelling out an ominous morse code of sorts but then, suddenly, the track surges spacewards and seems to dissolve in a tinsel shower of weird but beguiling sounds: was that a flute in there?
An early standout moment is Dr Bliss ‘25: a beautiful Pink Floyd-style number that orbits somewhere north of Venus. The bubbling synths, that also remind one of the spacewards sounds of mid-70s T-Dream, make matters lighter than Angel Delight. Some of the imagery Ka-Spell concocts alongside the music is remarkable, if gnomic. Take, “Where flesh creeps faster than the tide that swallows a loveless beach”, what on earth does it mean? And what is it with sinister, titled blokes in proggy pop? I was always suspicious of Dr Robert. And when hearing the lines, “He can see you / he can heal you”, The Pretty Things’ track, ‘Baron Saturday’, immediately popped into my head.
A side note: it’s worth quickly scanning over the album’s song titles as, when viewed collectively, they impart a feel of unease: especially those that feature a semicolon, which seems to suggest a conversation between the words themselves, such as ‘Blood Money: Transitional’. They have their own inner logic that may be best left unlocked. One such, the brilliant ‘Wire High: Too Far To Fall’, denotes maybe the most sinister moment on the record. The stripped intro (just an acoustic guitar strum) reinforces a feeling of dread. The lyrics encourage us to look inwards – at the subject of the song’s mental state – and then outwards, at the vision of a cat stretching on the window ledge. It is a remarkable switch of views that is initially given dramatic impetus by a symphonic and psychedelic Moody Blues-style arrangement. The track then enters outer space courtesy of some synth bleeps and whispers and we are left to draw our own conclusions.
And yet, in many of these (gently) dystopian soundtracks, a smidgeon of giving, breathing humanity is held out as succour. ‘Cold Comfort’ is a spaghetti western soundtrack set in outer space, borne aloft by an echoey guitar and ghostly organ. Amidst the melancholy, Ka-Spell reminds us, “Still, we love”. And the voice asking to “close the curtains” sounds homely and safe. Elsewhere, ‘How Many Fingers In The Fog’ takes its leave and floats off into the ether courtesy of a beautiful wash of synths; imagine an old hippy hot air balloon with “Tubeway Army” daubed in huge letters on its canvas: who wouldn’t want to take a ride… Closing track ‘Everything Under the Moon’, despite the ghoulish, maybe Ballardian lyrics, shuffles along in a pleasing and ultimately comforting manner. Maybe it’s the acceptance that we are all doomed, and staring into the void. Or maybe it’s that little vibraphone part that pops up now and again.
Visions of doom have always troubled humanity: whether through repeated millennial fears, comets, meteors, plagues, religious fervours, triffids, H-bombs, AI and climate collapse. But have they ever been wrapped in such a beguiling package?
