Goddamn, when did people start caring so much about
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti?
Recently? Around then?
Seriously, though, all of a sudden this man's everywhere, and it's blowing my mind. "Round and Round" is tearing things up, and rightfully so. It's got the chorus of the summer, of course, but retains a bit of the trademark strangeness and is sort of wildly
progressive for a pop song. I mean, seriously, how many ideas are crammed into these 5 minutes? The entirely misleading introduction? Or the misleading first minute with the red-herring chorus? The weird segue telephone call? The strangely sincere-sounding quiet section? Have you heard the
real chorus? Yeah, he deserves this sudden attention, no doubt.
(ok, reader, stop here and skip the next four paragraphs unless you either a) like Ariel Pink a lot, or b) like reading a lot of my writing. You've been warned.)Now, I promise not to turn this into one a "I was there first!" sort of hipster pissing contest (I was tossing around some portmanteau of "hipster" and "pissing" but it would have been more of a visual pun), so I say this as a fact and not as a boast or "holier than thou" proclamation, but I have been listening to Ariel Pink for years. It's been a slow, steady evolution to where he is now - the ultimate refinement of psychedelic weirdness with 70's radio staples and off-beat humour - but I'm partial, either because of nostalgia or legitimate preference, to his earlier albums. BUT OH LAWD, when isn't that the case with anyone and their favourite bands? Yeah, yeah, I know.
The Doldrums is one of
those albums for me, one of the records that can instantly take me back to a very specific time. Namely, at the end of high school where I was cautiously allowing some vague semblance of "pop music" into my library, no longer preoccupied with being as extreme/abstract/br00tal/outsider as possible (though whether I accomplished any of those is debatable). In any case, I checked out Ariel Pink on a whim, picking up
The Doldrums and being, er, very confused. Not by the lo-fi aspect, I had expected and accepted that, but just the music. It was thrilling, really: when was the last time you were legitimately interested enough in an album to listen to it repeatedly to try to understand it? I don't need/want to get into a "back in my day when we bought our records" thing, but y'know.
Point is, it was album I
worked at liking. Which I don't mean to be as image-conscious as it sounds. I mean, I
liked the album, sure. I liked the aesthetics. I liked the sound. I liked the ideas. I just couldn't really reconcile it all. I couldn't understand
Ariel Pink. I couldn't understand this weirdo no-fi beatbox-pop. And there weren't any resources to help, either. Now it's pretty clear who he is. And hell, he has a band. He has the
actual Haunted Graffiti. All I knew when I had
The Doldrums in my walkman was: 1) Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti is really just Ariel Pink, jamming/beatboxing into a tape-recorder, and 2) Animal Collective liked him enough to put out his albums.
TOTALLY SIDETRACKED FOR A MINUTE: Have you read the new Chuck Klosterman book? It's pretty cool. There's a whole chapter on irony and Weezer, focusing on how Weezer confuses people by being entirely unironic and earnest about their lyrics, and etc jaded society etc. Point being, I love this idea with relation to Ariel Pink, because I think I fell into the same trap. Not knowing a single thing about this man, I really couldn't tell how seriously I should take it. I think I want him to be completely serious. I want to believe he beatboxed all the drums because he had to. I want to believe he is entirely serious when he tells us that "good kids make bad grown-ups" in his pouty, childish whines of "growin' up means getting a job/oh, I don't wanna grow uuuup!". I want to never know why he refers to both "Kate" and "Cathy" on "For Kate I Wait". I love this complete mix-up of irony or earnestness and mystery and
I am completely overanalyzing an album Ariel Pink shat out years ago.(SPEAKING OF IRONY AND ARIEL PINK: the 16-minute track "Pedestrian Pop Hits" makes me giggle.)
So here it is, folks, one of my all-time favourites, in it's murky no-fi glory. One of very few albums I both like every song on and
know every song on, intimately so. Just download it already.
ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI - THE DOLDRUMS
Yeah, with a name like that, you know you're getting in to something good. "Experimental pop" is way too vague, I know, but that's really what it is. It's an entirely manic single: impossible to follow but curiously hook-laden thanks to the vocals. It's a total blast to actual hear something that you can't predict, from the drone-swell build-up to the spazzy bursts of blastbeats and all sorts of off-kilter mathy riffing recklessly thrown about when it's not a flattening wall of sound. The sort of song that begs to be immediately re-listened to even if you didn't like it because you'll want to try (and fail) to understand the thing. But, I mean, you won't not like it, that's impossible, sorry.
