Ariel Pink's fever dream of crazed influences and free-association is already one of the most divisive albums of the year. Alan Corr braves a listen
Like a one man episode of Family Guy, the flagrantly un-PC Ariel Pink has managed to start a small scale indie world moral outrage in the lead-up to this sprawling, go-for-broke 17-track double album.
The 36-year-old from LA (real name Marcus Ariel Rosenberg) manufactured a rather pathetic feud with Madonna earlier this year and he has has also earned the withering contempt of Grimes, Rosenberg clearly enjoys baiting the right-on brigade - he has previously professed his admiration for the fire and brimstone Westboro Baptist Church, but only because he finds the knee-jerk liberal reaction to them amusing because “they’re just exercising their free speech.”
So not the kind of pop star who is willing to play the game, which is admirable in itself but he's also more than a bit wayward in his choice of targets. However, in the same way that the actual music on U2's new album has been mostly overlooked in a rush to condemn the band's business methods, it would be a shame if distaste at Pink's knowing provocations were to overshadow the actual contents of Pom Pom.
He is a divisive figure for sure in the navel-gazing world of music's leftfield and his 12th album is both a wonderful mind-bending melange of trippiness and a truly irritating farrago of in-jokes, puerile throwaway observations on `taboo subjects', and zany musical conceits and tricks.
Like music's very own Jimmy Carr crossed with Wayne Coyne, the prolific Rosenberg has developed since his former life as a bedroom demo geek into a master of frazzled gonzo pop who has won comparisons with Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa.
His genre hopping and slapdash pastiche is restless and relentless on Pom Pom and for a man known for creating drum sounds using his mouth and sometimes his armpits, it is akin to being trapped in a Third Year class in a boy's school on a sweaty afternoon at the end of June.
His influences are clear. White Freckles sounds like No More Heroes by The Stranglers meets Echo Beach by Martha and The Muffins, only sang sang by any number of early eighties arty UK New Wavers, Nude Beach a Go-Go borrows Dick Dale surf guitar, and Gothic Bomb chucks a dumb thrash freak-out like a rotten egg.
Enjoyable stuff but the likes of Dinosaur Carebears, which jerks around from cod reggae and dub, to all out sonic assault, to Saturday morning cartoon kookiness, is irksome in the extreme, while on Sexual Athletics, Pink merely sounds like an extra sleazy and predatory Iggy Pop as he grinds out free-form poetry, or at least stuff that rhymes, such as: “I’m sweet, eat raw meat don’t admit to defeat”
Jell-o, which manages to out-Zappa Zappa, is a prelude to Black Ballerina, the song that has irked the culture war's watchful moral guardians the most, mainly because it features a spoken word skit involving a grandfather bringing his reluctant grandson to "the number one strip club in L.A."
If you manage to stick around long enough to hear the truly epic phantasmagoria of Exile On Frog Street, you've clearly been swept away by this gonzoid riot but when Pink drops his many fright wigs and masks, he does write some gorgeous songs. The jangle pop of Put Your Number In My Phone is a rare moment of welcome convention and Dayzed Inn Daydreams sounds like it was beamed in from the fag end of the sixties and played by a supergroup made up of The Mama and The Papas and Buffalo Springfield.
But for every moment of melodic relief there is a sample of horses neighing or a cuckoo clock springing off the wall. With these extremes of pure noise and cotton candy melody, it's quite something that Ariel Pink is not as teeth-grindingly annoying as Wayne Coyne.
Andy Warhol of lo-fi pop or puerile man child? Either way, Pom Pom is quite a trip. You’ll emerge on the other side dazed and confused but re-assured of pop music’s talent to both delight and infuriate.
Alan Corr
