Track of the Week: The Legendary Pink Dots: A Crack In Melancholy Time (1994)

For approaching thirty years, The Legendary Pink Dots have ploughed their own individual musical furrow, seemingly oblivious to the fashions and trends that shape popular music. And why should they? Ceaselessly following their muse through an ever-increasing number of albums, the Dots have developed almost in a vacuum to become the formidable power they are today - forever on the fringes, yet with a devoted cult following; musically individual and confident yet with a hunger to develop and experiment more. If the musical world at large doesn't give a damn, then that's the world's loss. LPD's career, if you can call it that, is a strange one. From their formation in London in 1980 in the early days, they combined a strong British psychedelic sound, reminiscent of past eccentrics like Gong and Julian Cope, with a Do-It-Yourself philosophy and a love of tape loops, found sound and industrial noise. Not to mention a fascination with the occult and apocalypse. Over the years, the band gained confidence until, with 1991's 'The Maria Dimension' album, they became one of the most striking and innovative, if largely unknown, bands around. By 1994's '9 Lives To Wonder', they had pretty much become a law unto themselves as far as the experimental underworld was concerned. Philip Knight's keyboards, samples and warped tape effects provides the perfect, dark unsettling backdrop for Edward Ka-Spel's dark lyrics, which he delivers sounding like Syd Barrett's ghost lost in deep space, made all the more affecting by his inability to pronounce the letter 'r'. 'A Crack In Melancholy Time' is one of the album's best songs. The deep, throbbing bass and gentle drums give the song a dubby feel, whilst the electronics crackle and whirr and a cold cosmic wind blows through the song's delicate bones. Meanwhile Ka-Spel mumbles something low in the mix about having blood on his hands, only coming through clearly in the chorus to chant 'Count me out! Count me out!'. His naturally frail voice suits the dark atmosphere of the song, as he rises from twitchy nervousness in the verses to a state of number panic for the chorus. About four minutes in, the instruments fade away, leaving the cosmic winds to howl malevolently to themselves for the remainder of the song. 'A Crack In Melancholy Time' is a showcase in dark tension, with the violence hovering just below the song's nervous surface. Its soft groove and catchy tune make it instantly memorable, but its genuine psychedelic derangement turns it into something more interesting. The Legendary Pink Dots will never be a popular band, as their manifold eccentricities put off some (probably most) listeners straight from the start. But they have been strangely influential in their own quiet way. They are certainly original and, if you can get into them, startlingly fresh and compelling. Perhaps, in twenty or so years time, they will be remembered as one of the great undiscovered cult bands of the 90s and beyond, or perhaps the world at large will never know. Either way, it seems that the Dots are perfectly happy to continue on their bizarre personal musical voyage. Long may they continue.