Ariel Pink - Haunted by the ghosts of the past

Beverlywood, 1988. Ariel Rosenberg is a little kid of just 10, blessed with real drawing talent and an aspiring singer-songwriter already trying his hand at writing his first little songs. Like many of his generation, Ariel had a very special babysitter: television; he grows up like this, spending hours glued open-mouthed to Mtv videos. He never misses an episode of “Miami Vice” or “The A-Team”, and watches the morning reruns of “Chips” when he plays hooky from school, utterly spellbound by every commercial that pops up in between. Already a budding music obsessive, he's forever on the hunt for sound material. Rummaging through dusty boxes, he finds his parents' worn-out vinyl, mostly vintage pop and well-worn hits bought for a few dollars; records that, despite being in terrible shape, will soon become his passion.

A few years later, between one arcade game and the next, I picture Ariel and his friends regularly meeting up at the arcade to trade re-recorded copies of tapes bought from older siblings; or trying to swap, for some new film, that pirated VHS of “Beverly Hills Cop” from the video rental store, duplicated and re-duplicated by half the school until Eddie Murphy's face and the famous theme song were barely recognizable.

YouTube, 2008. A bizarre character wanders the streets of Beverly Hills, captured in paradoxical, grainy videos that look like they came from a family home movie shot twenty years earlier, goofing around to pop tunes with a retro flavor.

To many he's nothing more than a caricature of some oddball world, but behind that absent look is none other than Ariel, the kid who grew up in the 80s, romantically attached to his dreams and his memories. Now Ariel is an adult, pouring all his expressiveness into a cheap tape recorder; he goes by Pink, Ariel Pink… it really does sound like a cartoon character's name, maybe he hasn't grown up all that much after all. Shut away at home for years, recording a monstrous quantity of tapes made for himself and collections never released, Ariel Pink has become a genuine legend of the Californian underground and one of the most fascinating outsiders of recent years, as well as the first inspiration behind the glo-fi sound.

The Noughties were the decade of “retromania”: digging up old sounds and trends from the past that might still have appeal in the present. A phenomenon fueled and made easier by mp3s, digital downloads and online music archives. With Ariel Pink this phenomenon stops being an end in itself and starts becoming a means, a tool to “create something no one else can do” and safeguard a forgotten heritage.

For Ariel, all music, once recorded, belongs to the present; without drawing on any particular genre, Pink's goal is “to do the things I like, and what I like are the things I don't hear”. The recorded musical past becomes raw material to be reassembled in a musical bricolage, grabbing here and there every sort of radio-friendly input that passed through the Sunset Strip and American programming schedules over the previous 50 years.

The spiritual fathers, knowingly or not, of Pink's “hauntological” path are three of the most eccentric and arcane personalities in pop culture. A common thread runs between the dazed atmospheres of Joe Meek, pioneer of the space age, and the novelty sound of the godfather of demented nonsense, Spike Jones; above all, though, he inherits the weird attitude of R. Stevie Moore, outsider and veteran of home recording, famous for his endless self-released output and homemade videos.

Ariel Pink plays at piling up outdated debris onto lo-fi grime, stirred into a “Zappa-esque” mix of radio interference that retraces glossy, dusty, faded pages of time. Scraps of melody are picked up from Hollywood blockbuster movie soundtracks and from Reagan-era cop shows, sifted through pre-adolescent memory.

Stealing sunshine themes from records long since warped by the years and the tunes of girl groups branded by Philles Records, digging through every sort of artistic cast-off, from the dregs of Italo-disco to the yacht rock in vogue among yuppies, Pink delights in resurrecting something dead, extinct, which he'd like to preserve in a sonic “bric à brac”.

Picking up cues from every musical era touched by the golden age of record labels, a time of large-scale pop production, Pink channels an eclectic kitsch repertoire of forgotten “retro-bits” into a hypnagogic, dreamlike, eccentric and grotesque mood, infecting it with suggestions borrowed from analog distortion, the smooth voices of radio speakers and 8-bit video games.

Blessed with melodic talent worthy of Brian Wilson, Pink skillfully manages to sum it all up into a ghostly, ultra-reverbed sound, built on a new concept of psychedelia made of sweet hallucinations, childish reminiscences and sleepless nights in front of the screen, of dreams fished out of a junkyard of pop trinkets, karaoke tunes, advertising jingles and sugary bubblegum refrains, recycled on tape decks and cheap vintage equipment.

Ariel Pink, flying in the face of the record business, exploits all the trashiest easy listening ever created, reducing it to an ethereal pink haze, giving it the look of the net generation's transcendental experience. Ephemeral, intangible and analog-smeared, it's an artificial fascination induced by an adolescence spent in front of the cathode-ray tube and the walkman.

Ariel Pink, with his Haunted Graffiti, thus puts himself forward as a key figure of the 2010s decade, having largely contributed to giving birth to chillwave, one of the most interesting currents to appear on the music scene since the turn of the millennium. His path is a tangled jungle of home recordings, reissues, posthumous releases and underground distribution, so to make sense of it all we'll go in recording order.

Ariel Rosenberg: Pre

It's the early 90s, Ariel Rosenberg is an eccentric Beverly Hills teenager, a fan of gothic-rock and bands like Sisters Of Mercy, Bauhaus, Christian Death and Cure; not exactly what you'd expect from a Californian high-schooler in the full swing of the grunge era. In 1996, armed with a tape recorder, he starts recording songs on cassette, and after graduating from Beverly Hills High School he enrolls at the California Institute of Art in Santa Clarita, where he'll carry on composing. Two years later he'll put to tape the recordings that will become Ariel Rosenberg's Thrash And Burn: Pre (Human Ear Music, 2006). The collection unfolds in a muffled mood, shaped in particular by the themes of Jan Hammer (as with much of his career), by “Berlin-era” Bowie and Lou Reed, as well as by the electronic experiments of LaMonte Young (more out of a will to “try things out” than any real passion for the artist). In these still very rough recordings, you can even hear, besides his trademark human beatbox, the clicking of the recorder's buttons and Ariel's breathing amid bare sounds and background noise.

As the tracks go by, it feels more like you're listening to an exercise than actual songs. Still, there are genuine gems, like the twilight groove of “Disco MIA AKA Bust A Move” or the Eastern-tinged loop of “Pleasure Spot 1 (Sweet Jane Rock'n'roll)”, probably lifted from a jingle recalling the most exotic Popol Vuh, laid under a vocal where Pink sketches out a cover of “Sweet Jane” (Velvet Underground). Another nod to the past can be found in the bare-bones country-rock of “On The Beach”, which hides a mangled version of “Sugar On My Tongue” (Talking Heads), and which seems to have stepped straight out of the Neil Young album of the same name. A prelude to the hypnagogic moods to come are the long experimental workouts “Cemetary Suite”, “Cry Yourself To Sleep (12 Minute Overture)”, “Rainy Den” and the crackling “Red Vynil”.

The Haunted Graffiti series

Haunted Graffiti 1: Rosenberg, adopting the pseudonym Ariel Pink, records between September 1998 and February 1999 the tracks that will make up Underground (Vynil International, 2007), the first album in the “Haunted Graffiti series”; a more mature and melodic record than its predecessor, built on sixties and roots sounds. After the not particularly happy opener “Shaven”, the record kicks into the fiery psych-rock of “Spires In The Snow”, poised between Beatles and Red Crayola, among the best tracks here, alongside the blues-punk of “Ghost Town”, haunted by the ghost of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and the Young-esque ballad of the title track. The only exceptions to the album's spirit remain the glam of “Auto Vanity” and the deadpan Elvis Presley parody on “Crusades”, which bring in 70s elements and novelty touches.

Haunted Graffiti 2: Pink, also in 1999, finishes the tapes later collected on The Doldrums (Paw Tracks, 2004), independently released in 2000. A dark and melancholic album, where the focus shifts to the period straddling the late 70s and early 80s. Listening to the record feels like spending a lonely summer night zapping between reruns and old hit parades, in a constant state of half-sleep. A hazy, mysterious atmosphere runs through the album in a steady escalation of highlights that begins with "God Kids Make Bad Grown Ups" and "Strange Fires", sinister tracks interspersed with Bee Gees-style falsettos later revisited in "Among Dreams", a tune that sounds like it could have come off "Breakfast in America".

"La Malinconia" carries on the Hi-NRG of "For Kate I Wait" and the nocturnal "Ballad of Bobby Pyn" (in honor of Darby Crash), moving numbers complete with Giorgio Moroder-style electro effects, reproduced "by hand" by Pink using his own voice. A sort of dreamy trilogy is made up of "Envelopes Another Day", "Young Pilot Astray" and "Grey Sunset"; the latter would be the first Pink track to be accompanied by a video, directed by Travis Peterson in 2008, in which Ariel, dressed as a woman, ironically plays the part of an 80s pop star.

Haunted Graffiti 3/4: Between September 2000 and July 2001, Pink brings to life the third and fourth installments of Haunted Graffiti with Scared Famous (Human Ear Music, 2007) and FF>> (independent release, 2002), independently released as a double album in 2002.

On Scared Famous, reissued in 2007 (with a different tracklist), melancholy gives way to freakiness and bubblegum; here Pink draws compositional inspiration from artists like Residents and Frank Zappa. Intriguing exotic moods open the first half of the double LP with "Gocapulco", a jingle straight out of a 1950s tropical-destination ad, echoed later in the hypnotic Hawaiian textures of "The Kitchen Club". It's an album of wide-ranging influences, where Pink exhumes and warps the disco-funk of K.C. & The Sunshine Band and Kool and the Gang on tracks like "Howling At The Moon" and "Jesus Christ Come To Me In A Dream", alongside the glam moments of "Talking All The Time", "Scared Famous" and "Why I Can't Be Me", often letting the falsettos run wild.

Standout moments include the magical dance of "Baby Comes Around", weakened by ups and downs and vocal intrusions and by noisy reverb in the background, the long, elaborate baroque of "In A Tomb All Your Own", and the syncopated video-game delirium of "Are You Going To Look After My Boys?"; a track followed by a film by Eric Fensler in which a gloriously tacky Ariel jokingly sports a New York Dolls t-shirt and a pair of disco glasses missing a lens. Another video was produced for the sugary pseudo-duet "Politely Declined", in which Pink is busy dodging the advances of a lovestruck girl at the funfair.

In the second half of the album, which also features tributes to alternative rock, we find "My Molly", a nod to the Vaselines, hardcore punk softened by a DJ's voice on "Victor", and the childlike, lo-fi, Johnston-esque "One More Time".

Haunted Graffiti 5: House Arrest (Paw Tracks, 2006), recorded between October 2001 and July 2002, returns to the Sixties, to psychedelic rock and sunshine pop. The dominant presences on this record are groups like the Monkees, the Turtles and Jefferson Airplane. It opens with "Hardcore Pops Are Fun", a Lennon-esque hymn to pop music, continues with the saccharine verses of "Interesting Results" and with the sarcastic ballad "West Coast Calamities", in which Pink presents himself as the sea monster Davy Jones.

The rhythms heat up thanks to the rock'n'roll of "Baby Comes Around" and the folk-rock of "Every Night I Die At Miyagis". After the title track, the musical collages become denser and less noticeable, giving way to fusions of genres and eras. "Alisa" is driven by a timeless refrain (“You’re in my heart/ you’re in my dreams/ you’re in my soul”), while "Ocean Of Weep" recalls some pompous AOR number stretched out and filtered through a wall, from which the echo of "Everybody's Talking" (Fred Neil) and "Abraham, Martin And John" (Dion) suddenly emerges.

The record closes with a kind of original, if unlikely, new-wave take on Donovan on the long and varied "Netherlands", followed by "Higher And Higher", a closing track that playfully blends "old wave" and "new wave".

Haunted Graffiti 6: originally released as a double album together with House Arrest in 2002, Lover Boy (Ballbearings Pinantas, 2006) takes a deep dive into the seventies, from funk to power pop, from disco music to new wave. The album pivots around tracks like "One On One", "Poultry Head", "Lover Boy", "Let's Get Marry Tonight" and "Ghost", which give the impression of dealing with a hybrid creature that blends disco rhythms with a Gang Of Four-style funk-punk.

Other highlights of Lover Boy are the analog electro experiments of "Pheobus Palast" and "Blue Straws", and the funky chillout of "New Trumpet Of Time", where the sonic textures of Brian Eno resurface.

"Credit" and "Older Than Her Years" sound like they came off some damaged tape of a Village People or Boney M single, while echoes of Chilton-esque power pop and the Raspberries resurface in tracks like "Jonanthan's Halo", "Hobbie's Galore", "I Don't Need Enemies" and the distorted "Doggone (Shegone)".

Haunted Graffiti 7: Holy Shit (independent release, 2003) is a no-frills EP, featuring songs already found on other albums along with a few less successful pieces. The various untitled tracks are essentially noise experiments reproduced by Pink using analog means, often lasting less than 5 seconds.

Haunted Graffiti 8: recorded between September 2002 and February 2003, Worn Copy (Rhystop, 2003/Paw Tracks, 2005) is a mature record, though it often suffers from technical shortcomings that aren't quite up to par. Pink, with his "worn copy", now has a clear idea of the result he wants to achieve: influences are often blended to the point of creating genuine crossovers, or pasted together in musical collages. The album is therefore a work focused more on compositional method than on song form itself, often drawing inspiration from the work of Ween to achieve its results.

The moods of The Doldrums are echoed in "The Drummer", "Oblivious Peninsula" and "Crybaby", while "Cable Access Follies" and "Creepshow" have something of a funkadelic feel to them. Imaginative collages appear in "Trepanted Earth" (split into 3 movements), "Somewhere In Europe/Hotpink!", "Foilly Foibles/GOLD", and remarkable moments of creative mixing emerge in "Bloody! (Begoria)", "Threspian City" and "Jagged Carinval Tour".

"Immune To Emotions" and "Artifact" are the perfect blend of Sixties and Eighties sounds, interspersed with a French refrain in the glam rock of "Jules Lost His Jewels". The album's standout moment and Pink's personal masterpiece is the melancholic "Life In L.A.", the story of an alienating, suburban Los Angeles told in Nicolas Amato's video shot in Beverly Hills in 2004, where Ariel wanders the neighborhood/zoo like a drowsy urban "tarzan", blowing paper trumpets.

Paw Tracks

By the summer of 2003, Pink already boasts a catalogue of more than 500 songs, countless never officially released tapes, and plenty of collaborations behind him. A chance for the spotlight comes at an Animal Collective show, where he's introduced by mutual friend Jimi Hey to the New York band, who just a few months earlier had founded their own label: Paw Tracks. Pink, unaware of the collective's new plans, hands them a cd-r of The Doldrums recordings, by then already four years old (probably his favorite - who could blame him?). The band is struck by it and gets back in touch with Pink several weeks later to offer him a deal; shortly after, he becomes the first musician signed to Paw Tracks.

Fresh off signing with the new label, Pink releases the new edition of The Doldrums in 2004, while the following year sees the release of Worn Copy and House Arrest. The Los Angeles artist finally gains a degree of notoriety, helped along by the mystery surrounding this figure: most of the songs, after all, are completely unknown to his fans.

With Paw Tracks and a modest level of fame come the first tours, which find Ariel completely unprepared, mostly due to the incompatibility of his music with live performance. The early shows, built around pre-recorded tracks, don't win over much of an audience. Pink subsequently starts bringing in musicians for his performances, until in 2008 he settles on a permanent lineup with his friend Jimi Hey, keyboardist Kenny Gilmore and guitarist Cole M.G.N., thus founding Haunted Graffiti.

4AD

Having become a well-known name on the American underground scene, Ariel had for too many years remained musically tethered to cassette tapes reissued as sonically poor LPs: he needed a turning point. Interest in Ariel Pink and his Haunted Graffiti finally arrives from across the ocean, and in November 2009 he signs with the famous independent label 4AD Records, a dream-pop pioneer (Cocteau Twins above all) and a historic name in alternative rock, founded in 1979 by Ivo Watts-Russell, mastermind behind the ethereal supergroup This Mortal Coil.

After years spent composing on an 8-track multitrack recorder, with the move to 4AD, Pink starts using a proper recording studio and an actual team of session musicians to cut his tracks, giving his music a professional finish alongside a digital lo-fi quality. A bit of analog magic gets lost along the way, but the creativity remains intact; for Ariel, the new work is seen as a "condensed, more concentrated" version of his old recordings.

Before Today (4AD, 2010). On April 26, 2010, "Round Round" is released, Ariel Pink's first single for 4AD, a terrific pop track accompanied by a hypnotic video shot by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips on his iPhone.

Released on June 8, 2010, the album is a baroque pastiche of chameleon-like, quasi-Zappaesque mimicry, built around a flowing, sticky bubblegum-pop, packed with disposable, glazed melodies, stretched between Joe Meek, Prince, Fleetwood Mac and Phil Spector lost in a scrapheap of sonic plastics worn down by the most relentless use.

With his dadaist, shape-shifting approach, fed by arte povera and an encyclopedic ingenuity, Ariel Pink ends up putting his name to a bona fide pop record, hypnotic and intoxicating. The references to the past are countless, from the prog-tinged psychedelia of "L'estat..." to formidable covers like "Reminiscences", Ethiopian pop dating back to the dictatorial communist Derg period, and an explosive version of "Bright Lit Blue Skies" by the Rockin' Ramroads. The song is backed by a video full of Sixties beach vibes, where Pink and the band burst into an all-girls college aboard a cardboard "trojan horse".

Once again there's no shortage of eccentricity, irony and dadaist touches, especially in the guitar fury of "Butt-Hourse Blondies" and "Little Wig", but also in the "transsexual" parody of "Menopause Man" and the post-disco of "Beverly Kills".

After years of paying his dues, Pink finally achieves the critical and commercial success he deserves, reaching number 163 on Billboard and earning positive reviews across various webzines. Before Today marks the rise of a new messiah of the pop miracle-con, part Houdini, part Arcimboldo, part (actually very much) Todd Rundgren, a master of DIY bricolage and a cerebral dispenser of circular riddles with no solution.

Two years later comes Mature Themes (4AD, 2012). With the new single "Only in My Dreams", streaming from July 9, 2012, we find on YouTube a latin-lover version of Ariel Pink, sporting an outlandish bubblegum-pink hairdo, dreaming of clumsily flirting with every girl who crosses his path. On August 20, 2012, he delivers an album that doesn't disappoint, able to renew itself since his studio debut while keeping its naïve stamp intact.

The defining trait of the 4AD-era Pink is precisely harmony: dated notes are recombined, stripped of the old, stale dust they'd gathered over the years, so that, on some subconscious level, it's as if old hits sounded exactly the way we'd want to hear them in the 2010s.

It kicks off strong with “Kinski Assassin” and “Mature Themes”, two songs that revisit the sixties themes of House Arrest, albeit with a noticeably cleaner and more controlled production. Working through the tracklist, a string of pop culture blends revisits all of Ariel's past: from the blazing intro of “Is This The Best Spot?” (little more than a freaky punk-flavored divertissement), moving through the shimmering psych-pop of “Only In My Dreams”, the kaleidoscopic “Driftwood” and the goofy pop chorus of “Symphony Of The Nymph”, all the way to the italo-disco caricature of “Pink Slime”, complete with vocals in Italian.

The thousand faces Ariel Pink takes on across the album's thirteen tracks once again come, in truth, from the fringes of America—from karaoke nights, old road movies and cheap drugs; a cut-rate copy of what happens in the big city, arriving filtered through the media. The musician moves through all this drunkenly, no longer sure whether what he's doing is interpretation, Zappa-esque parody, or simply unconditional surrender to the state of things. The ecstasy of “Nostradamus And Me” and the dive-bar blues cover of “Baby” (Donnie and Joe Emerson) seem to suggest the latter. But even in this (almost) mature outing, where the artist's near and distant past finally achieve a definitive synthesis, Ariel Pink still manages to throw the stone and hide his hand, slipping away from any attempt to pin him down into a clear, transparent shape.

In the two years separating Mature Themes from its successor, meanwhile, there's certainly no shortage of drama. Ariel receives a collaboration offer from none other than the entourage-potëmkin of a certain Mrs. Ciccone, an offer our man turns down, not without launching some fiery criticism at the former material girl's way of operating: “They suddenly need something bold, they need songwriting. They can't afford yet another techno-jam from her Avicii or whoever, rehashed one more time and passed off as twenty years younger. What they really need are songs. And maybe I'm partly responsible for this kind of comeback.” Rosenberg's statements predictably set the web ablaze, in particular the enraged die-hard fanbase of Ciccone, who for her part will hasten to deny everything, denying any willingness to work with “little mermaids.”

And yet, reading between the lines of the gossip, the half-statements, the looks exchanged, you can sense that this time, deep down, Ariel Pink has kept his word, and that the goofball of just a few years earlier is slowly, genuinely fading into a more defined and focused personality—almost “self-aware,” though no less fragile or cynically melancholic for it. But let's take this step by step and get into the record that, title-wise, is still called Pom Pom.

Ariel Pink's eleventh record opens with a parade of pink piglets and plastic raincoats, in a sequence of double-meaning images where references to high society are overlaid onto the playful, semi-Dionysian childishness of the chorus's ring-around-the-rosy. It's a very different kind of childishness, though, the one in “Plastic Raincoats In The Pig Parade”—not the typical lo-fi bacchanal we'd largely grown used to from him, but a track with real taste and structure, of a strange, complex sweetness closer to the circus joys of Kevin Ayers. Above all, it announces, without much preamble, that Pom Pom is a record where nothing is left to chance: from the stop&go moments to the music-box melodies, every element is carefully measured, with a production that for the first time becomes shrewd and muscular. Even the stylistic diversity—another non-negotiable trait of the Pink universe—is kept within a more homogeneous, well-calibrated overall vision.

But it's in the more synth-wave-oriented territory, ground he'd already explored since the celebrated Before Today, that Ariel truly unleashes his masterstrokes. Starting with the desolate beauty of “Lipstick”, existentialism in make-up that echoes Eastern European eighties sounds, the hardcore carnality—in more ways than one—of “Not Enough Violence” (“Providence of angels and fairymen/ Here after all’s well and said and done/ What’s the view like from your bed/ Where a handful of love goes down where you got fed/ Now it’s time for pain – That’s right/ Penetration time tonight”), all the way to the irreverent “Black Ballerina”, counterpointed by cybernetic synth lines and post-decadent brothels spied through the keyhole (“Pardon Mrs. Dolly Parton/ Condoleezza, turn me on/ Bet your bottom, Dolly/ Wrapped in dollars all I gots to spend”).

Inputs, signals and references that together make up what is, in effect, the clearest act of faith our man has so far laid at the altar of Zappa-ism, expressed, on closer inspection, across the entire length of the album and distilled in the brilliant satirical freak outs of “Jell-o”, “Sexual Athletics”, “Goth Bomb” (which, incidentally, features a choir-and-wall-of-guitar track reminiscent of the Mothers Of Invention), but also in the collection of worn-out American clichés on “One Summer Night”.

Symbols, stereotypes, myths of a civilization that never kept its promises, and which, in its long decline, has scattered shards, insecurities and pink plastic in a state of surrender in which, as an unusually candid Ariel once reminded us, “we are all victims”—and which only the brightest among the alienated are still able to recycle into poetry.

As the ever-perceptive Simon Reynolds writes in one of his pieces (found under the title “Figli di Madre Natura” in the anthology “Hip-Hop-Rock”, published by Isbn), Ariel Pink's records almost always give the bizarre sensation of listening to the scorched, crackling broadcast of a mainstream little radio echoing up from the grimy bottom of some American swimming pool: bubbles of worn-out, gurgling sound that reassemble the shattered image of a shifting, low-fidelity trash-pop. A ghost-music that reshapes and contorts itself, somewhere between dream and remembrance, in an all-consuming ecstasy of oddball forms, until it rises back to the surface and evaporates into a vanishing artifice.

Yet another label change, this time to Mexican Summer, marks another course correction for the Beverlywood kid, ushering in a new phase where the current exuberance doesn't automatically line up with the abundance of his early work, partly restoring darker, more lo-fi tones.

Dedicated To Bobby Jameson (2017) is an almost therapeutic record, a tribute to Bobby Jameson: a musician discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham who enjoyed a brief moment of fame in the Sixties collaborating with the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa, before being swallowed up by a whirlwind of personal troubles (alcohol, drugs and several suicide attempts), only to resurface in 2007, surprising everyone who had long assumed he was dead.

Framing it all is the usual sound-rich blend of refined references, mixing soul, pop, electronics, new wave, beat and psychedelia with the same pioneering spirit as a pirate radio station from the Seventies and Eighties.

Like a radio sequence, Dedicated To Bobby Jameson alternates brilliant moments with slightly flatter tracks, all of them nonetheless serving the passionate storytelling around Jameson's figure—and it's in this light that one can partly forgive the project's reduced impact. The harmonic swirl of the velvety “Another Weekend”, the provocative sensuality of “Kitchen Witch” and the delightful refrain of the glam gem “Bubblegum Dreams” confirm the musician's colorful, original style, which never fails to inject his songs with genuine tenderness (“Do Yourself A Favor”) and passion (“Death Patrol”).

Nostalgia and innocence continue to align in Ariel Pink's universe, as he pushes his Eighties citationism to the limit, bringing together Cure and Psychedelic Furs in a single track (“Feel Like Heaven”), name-checking Gary Numan (“Santa's In The Closet”) and even the Buggles of “Video Killed The Radio Star” (“Time To Live”). This time, though, a sense of bitterness and near-psychological disorientation prevails: disillusionment is the dominant language of the lyrics, while the musician's proverbial knack for crafting ingenious melodies isn't always quite on point. Beyond the usual connective interludes that have always served as glue on Ariel's albums, this time there are a few filler tracks that don't help the listening experience, relegating Dedicated To Bobby Jameson to a slightly less energetic chapter of his discography. Without a doubt, a figure like Ariel Pink operates on a “take it or leave it” basis, so it's only natural that even a less innovative or well-calibrated project doesn't dent his artistic standing—but it's undeniable that, this time, rather than taking risks and innovating, the musician chose to consolidate his status.

In the meantime, the long-awaited release of the four “Archives” volumes has turned into a real headache. Dropped by his label Mexican Summer after taking part in the pro-Trump rally in Washington D.C. on January 6th, Ariel Pink was quick to deny having taken part in the storming of Capitol Hill, claiming instead that he had peacefully and civilly joined the demonstration while staying on the White House lawn, and that he ended the evening with a nap back at his hotel.

Despite the clarification, following the release of the first volume Odditties Sodomies Vol. 1 and the preview of the second installment Sit n' Spin, the fate of the other two albums in the "Archives" series ("Odditties Sodomies Vol. 3" and "Scared Famous / FF >>") has remained up in the air due to the worsening of the situation: Pink's ex-girlfriend has filed a sexual abuse complaint. An event that has triggered further, dangerous consequences: death threats have reportedly been made, even against the artist's family members.

Announced and released by Mexican Summer before the relationship with Pink broke down, "Sit n' Spin" certainly does little to win back sympathy for the American musician, consisting as it does of outtakes and demos dating back to his most troubled and uncertain creative period, and therefore destined to delight only die-hard fans, much like all four volumes of the project.

The quirkiness of the title track, the energy of "Revenge Of The Iceman", the dissonances of "In The Force" and the excellent cover of "She's Gone" by garage-punk outfit the Dovers are nonetheless enough to file this collection away as an interesting glimpse into the depths of the American artist's musicality.

The recordings cover a period of research and experimentation with the formula that would later find its perfect creative distillation on albums like Pom Pom, and it's a pleasure to catch that naive spirit that would go on to define his artistic path. That said, a collection of demos from an artist already naturally inclined toward a collage of sounds and lyrical ideas is hardly the ideal project to consolidate his profile, which, to be fair, comes across as even more frayed than his most recent output.

Sit n' Spin is a record that struggles to find its way into the listener's ear and is quickly filed away without much emotion, making the analysis of the next two chapters in the "Archives" series even trickier.

Contributions by Ciro Frattini, Francesco Giordani, Roberto Rizzo, Gianfranco Marmoro

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