Legendary Pink Dots NA tour

[Henderson Keith]

Mark asked...

>Maybe I'll go the Albuquerque show.  I know their name, but not familiar
>with their music.  Would you recommend starting with either Shadow Weaver
or
>Malachai Shadow Weaver Part 2?

No.  From what I remember (these CDs are still sitting in Pittsburgh,
waiting
for me to reclaim them some future day), these are not very exciting.  LPD
are a strange band...quite a lot of their 'music' is downtrodden,
depressing,
poetic ranting by Ka-Spel.  But then much of the rest is wild, spooky,
pulsating
electronic madness that is really quite excellent.  You kinda hafta sift
through the chaff to find the gems IMHO.  In recent years, their live shows
have (seemingly) been more of the latter, which meant that they were really
good, eg. the Perfect Mystery tour.  Hopefully, they've kept up in this
vein,
though I haven't heard the new albums since 2000.

So...if you can find any of these three, I would recommend...

A Perfect Mystery (2000)
Hallway of the Gods (1997)
The Maria Dimension (1991)

or as a good live album (with a few sound quality flaws, but otherwise)...
Live at the Metro (1998, '99 release)

Note that LPD has *the* most ridiculously confusing discography of *any*
band that I've ever seen.  Stuff that originally came out on cassette/LP
in the early 80s has been repackaged in small bits, retitled, rereleased
in other strange countries.  And they've been continually doing this
"Chemical Playschool" series (that I think started out as 10" EPs), I
think they're up to 13 or so...and these again have been gathered up in
100 different ways onto CD.  And also a 'song' series called "Premonition,"
which is somewhere in the 20s.  I have no idea the story/idea behind these.

A long time ago, I put together a list of what was the main core of studio
albums (maybe I even posted it here, so an archive search might find it),
which was mainly for myself in order to avoid buying the same thing over
and over again.  HW may have a larger number of releases, but LPD outdoes
them in terms of complexity IMHO.

The three albums I list above are all 'self-contained' and without
ambiguity.  And all have a 'spacier' feel without so much Ka-spel ranting.

Good luck, and I definitely recommend the show - LPD are very much
different than HW, but appeal to the same senses

Grakkl (FAA)

P.S.  Trying to catch up with the discography, I see albums entitled
"All the King's Horses" and "All the King's Men" both from 2002 and both
separate track lists.  I guess this is a 'double' CD release in two parts?
Just to make it harder to follow?!  Other than the brand new one
(Whispering Wall), these two are the only other 'new' full-length studio
ones since "Perfect Mystery"?