On the Road Again
Live Reviews:

The Legendary Pink Dots
October 14, 1998
The Opera House, Toronto, ON

If David Lynch were to open a bar, he'd have to get the Legendary Pink Dots to be his house band. Their music is twisted, intelligent, and disturbing, just like the Eraserhead auteur's work. Granted, on CD the Pink Dots can sound too self-enclosed, but live, they're an Experience.

Of course, it helps to be in the right mood for an evening of decadence and sardonicism, and the atmosphere in the Opera House at their recent Toronto concert helped. To begin with, the show wasn't sold out (i.e. each audience member had more than a cubic foot of space to stand in, and the temperature was below 50 degrees). As well, the venue's atmosphere of gutted baroque splendour was entirely fitting.

Most of the night's material was drawn from the Pink Dots' latest release, the dense, dark Nemesis On-Line. While the music mixed genres in a way that was alternately amusing, unsettling, disorienting and painfully compelling, the band members' different personalities stood out in a similar way.

To begin with, there was Niels van Hoornblower, saxist and flautist extraordinaire, and seemingly a graduate of the Shuffle Demons school of fashion. The madly capped one would stroll around the stage playing processed sax solos amidst the chaos around him; at one point, he donned a headpiece with twin pin spotlights and traipsed through the crowd, honking in audience members' ears.

Ryan Moore, the group's token Canadian (and token musician with a normal name), occasionally played bass but stayed for the most part behind the drum kit, where he resembled Yes stickwielder Alan White in more than just appearance, shaking his curly locks and pounding the skins of his drums as if trying to summon up the ghost of progressive rock, occasionally flinging a water bottle into the air in celebration. Beside him on the stage stood stoic guitarist Edwin Von Trippenhof, keeping a low Nordic profile but sometimes venturing out from behind the speakers to lash out with a winding solo.

On stage right stood the keyboardist, one of the group's two remaining original members. Phil "The" Silverman, with his open-necked white shirt and shaggy goatee, resembled a Krautrocker gone techno, fiercely twiddling knobs on his analog synth and leaning back either in ecstasy or to escape the recoil from a belligerent sine wave.

The other founding member was frontman Edward "The Prophet" Qa-Sepel, his trademark shades firmly in place but the pencil mustache of yore thankfully gone. The prophet sneered, sighed, smoked, and screamed, sometimes leaning on his mike-stand and talking about Cornwall, Ontario with a world-weary air; other times sinking to the ground and yelling at full voice in the Pink Dots' made-up language. He's not your conventional frontman, and he doesn't work the crowd like Bowie or even Nick Cave. Still, at moments like the final encore, when the band works itself into a Pink Floyd "Interstellar Overdrive"-like frenzy, spotlight lash out at the transfixed audience and Qa-Sepel stares up at the Opera House's high ceiling, belting out "IT'S A LONG WAY TO ANDROMEDA," the prophet's got as commanding a presence as anyone. "The Andromeda Suite" brought to mind the theme song to a lost late-seventies animated science fiction movie. It also suggested that if there's anyone today capable of leading a millennial suicide cult to send people to the stars, it's Qa-Sepel. Of course, he'd probably fake death, wait for his followers to off themselves, and walk around pillaging their wallets, then sell the movie rights to David Lynch. Until that glorious day, he and the Pink Dots are content to release a never-ending stream of independent import CD's and distort their followers' minds at $25 or $30 a crack, waiting for the next concert fix. Who needs drugs? The Legendary Pink Dots are the best bad trip around.