2003 was a strange year for Edward Ka-Spel and Phil Knight (aka the Silver Man). For the pair, it marked the first year since 1980 that their Legendary Pink Dots project hadn't released an album-- and they were coming off a year in which they'd released three. After 21 years of grinding out studio albums at a clip of nearly two a year, along with touring and all of the other things that go along with residing on the margins of popular music, I suppose they just needed a bit of a break. On the evidence provided by The Whispering Wall, that break served them well: The Whispering Wall is one of the most accessible records of their career.
Of course, that just proves that everything's relative. There's more than enough Dots weirdness here to satiate fans and send just about everyone else running for the hills. The curious few remaining and wondering where to dip their toes into the band's massive catalog could certainly do worse than this-- if you like the idea of a whimsical British Einstürzende Neubauten, this is your band, and The Whispering Wall makes a suitably disconcerting companion to Neubauten's own 2004 album, Perpetuum Mobile.
The arc of this album is a fair bit more minimalist than most past Dots efforts, with Edward Ka-Spel's "r"-less invocations tiptoeing through Rorschach blots of keyboard, sputtering, pitch-black electronics and the occasional mausoleum cabaret breakdown. And yet, it all begins very aggressively with "Soft Toy", a pulsing nod to Van Der Graaf Generator and original-edition King Crimson beset by Niels Van Hornblower's sax outbursts and guided by Erik Drost's grit-teethed rhythm guitar. The album doesn't return to this kind of aggressive dark prog again, but it does feature a great deal more variety and consistency than the average Dots platter.
"A Distant Summer" is a pensive, tense hymn with self-harmonized Ka-Spels (almost too) quietly intoning over an unchanging programmed beat as static washes, subcutaneous guitar and skin-tickling electronic clouds of electronic debris float by underneath. The song is a perfect example of how uncomfortable the Dots can make a song, as the tension builds and builds and builds, never to release-- it's a sort of musical adaptation of water torture, but it's intensely seductive as well. "For Sale" bobs on bright synths that recall a less coldly calculated Kraftwerk, while "King of a Small World" is quietly ferocious death jazz featuring mostly Ka-Spel backed by nothing but a walking bass and staccato organ. "And when they least expect it, we shall take them in a blaze of glory/ See the future/ See the chalk lines," he deadpans, raising his voice ever so slightly in a way that underscores its chilling menace.
And that reflects a lot of what's great about the Dots-- they traffic in horror and gothic darkness, but they do it with elegance, more slowly crescendoing George Romero dread than Wes Craven splatterfest. They even end the album with a moment of genuine, placid beauty in "No Wall, No Strings", which is nothing but a few minutes of soft drone with a slowly shifting melodic tone playing over it. In a way, that little piece of beauty and light at the album's end relieves the tension and terror of the hour that precedes it, and even if it doesn't take the band completely out of the black forest they call home, it makes The Whispering Wall one of the band's most satisfying albums.
