A few years ago, when Tower Records still existed, I ran into a high school friend there. This guy, Pete, was basically my hero; while I was busy getting panic attacks from trig, his band was playing at the Knitting Factory. He’s a cool dude, and he used to turn me and my friends on to weird stuff like Necrophagist and Devo and Lightning Bolt and the Locust. So I didn’t know what to get at Tower that day and Pete, of course, had a suggestion. He recommended Worn Copy by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffitti, which I bought and did not listen to for a long time. The cover was weird, the music was impenetrable to my 18-year-old punk ears, and something about it didn’t sit right with me. What I would come to realize, however, was that getting handed this CD by my buddy Pete that day many years ago was like looking for a dollar you threw out by accident and finding a VCR full of dirty jewels in the dumpster.
It’s lo-fi, meaning muddy and echo-y, but it’s not amateur in the least. This guy has written some of the best pop songs I’ve ever heard. He knows every move, every school of pop music, and uses them whenever he feels like it, at will. He takes the best of 80’s metal, doo-wop and Motown, and rock and…well, the genres he manipulates are irrelevant, because he creates his own. In short, he’s a goddamn professional.
Fortunately for us though, Pink’s charm rests fully on the quality of his songs and their unique sound, not on anything overthought or scientific. He’s weirdly funny, and completely insane. Only a songwriter with Ariel Pink’s ebullient creativity could write a greasy rhinestone rock song about his cat getting neutered, especially one that features the lines just cause you’re a cat don’t mean you ain’t a man. The name of the song? “Jules Lost His Jewels.”
Another track, “Artifact,” begins with the line I am the sun of the future, 25 years from now. I believe it whenever I hear it. Ariel Pink is writing for the future, or perhaps from the future. He speaks, in this song, as a sort of jaded prophet of a future consumerist society even worse than our own: son, I gotta tell ya bout the future see it’s a living hell, not at all like the golden age, they’re gonna kill yer comforts with worries, pertaining to your health, pertaining to ya future, pertaining to yo mama. That’s the kind of sad humor we get from Pink, and the almost frighteningly earnest/bizarre music ain’t just background, either. It’s the perfect music for pronouncement: swirling and electronic, with a chunky rotoscope lightsaber feel to the guitar that would date this song (80’s) if it weren’t brilliant-sounding.
There’s a lot not to like about Ariel Pink—I can understand that. Abrasive feedback, strange Tourette’s-like outpourings of lewdness and, as I said earlier, borderline-frightening weirdness. Admittedly, that last trait is one thing I love about Pink and his music. What makes all this acceptable, even DESIREABLE, though is that it is coupled with vocal harmonies and interlocking quadruple rainbow guitar overdubs that are so achingly beautiful they would make George Harrison’s eyeballs explode. Ariel Pink makes sad music, some of the saddest, in fact. But lying in bed at 2:30 in the morning listening to this stuff, you’d swear that loneliness tastes great.
