Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - Before Today
The curious case of Ariel Pink involves increasing amounts of discussion on the topic of influence. Though he’s been writing and recording music for almost 15 years, it’s looking like the late 00’s will be remembered as the time he finally came into his own. Currently, the influence discussion goes both directions. The bulk of his extensive and muddled catalogue is concerned with repurposing and reinterpreting sappy, square, vanilla pop-rock from the 70s and 80s—what I like to call ‘yacht rock’—couched in the lo-fi sonics of decaying cassettes and warped through the lens of psychedelic outsider art. Like every other modern artist, he mixes old things together in an attempt to breathe new life into them. The difference in Pink’s case is that he never bothered to place himself in the context of wider culture and had to wait several years before the world was ready to hear things that resembled the songs he’d been churning out all along. That started happening last year, and since then he’s been christened the father of the rising chillwave and lo-fi movements in hindsight. The irony of waiting to claim a wider audience until the way had been paved by those he’d inspired is surely not lost on Pink, but Before Today is a well-deserved moment of recognition that couldn’t have come at a better time. The album title says it all: it’s the past finally catching up to the present (or maybe the present catching up to the past).
It’s in that spirit that I’d like to throw two more names into the influence discussion that I think put a better frame of context around this album than anything especially current. The first is Daniel Johnston. Like Johnston, Pink has largely functioned as an outsider artist in a pretty strict sense of the word—reclusive, eccentric, obsessively productive, and inextricably linked to the sound texture and work ethic of lo-fi home recording despite having moved beyond it. The work of both artists is infused with an otherworldly vibe that is wholly unmistakable and which follows them from basement to studio to stage. There’s something kind of dark and haunting (pun intended?) in their ‘amateur’ perversions of soft, innocent styles. The other name I’d like to mention is Beck (himself a huge Johnston fan), circa 1996. Pink and Beck both treat music history like a thrift store record bin, picking through genres and melding them together, drawing attention to their patchy range of aesthetics while never losing sight of the ultimate goal: to create an engaging, dazzling pop record. Beck did it with the funky, noisy, fractured and cool collages of Odelay and Ariel Pink has done it with the manic, twisting, fevered stew of Before Today.
Sputtering traffic sounds, a tight beat, and smooth saxophones fade slowly in to opener “Hot Body Rub” like the theme music to some forgotten shady police drama. It’s actually a pretty cool and bouncy track until Pink yelps his way into the mix with what sounds like “Hot tub! / Get into my hot tub!” Now I get it—he’s mocking dated ‘sexy’ music, or perhaps paying tribute to it with a glam rocker’s sense of garish humor. Good to know he’s not taking himself too seriously, since the next song is a very faithful and rote cover of The Rockin’ Ramrods’ late-60s garage rock song “Bright Lit Blue Skies.” It’s here, when the chorus hits and Haunted Graffiti pile on blasts of surprisingly exquisite harmonies, that it becomes clear there’s a massive well of talent behind all this nostalgic weirdness. “L’estat” shifts its tempo and pacing every few phrases as if to keep pace with Pink’s morphing melodic ticks. The chorus has a singsongy, Beatles-esque “Yeah-yeah” hook, while the song rolls toward its synth-heavy, almost-Floydian conclusion. “Friday Night” takes an inverted approach, mutating Pink’s lead vocals in both highs and lows (so he sounds like either a helium junkie or a demon) around the song’s airy, whooshing psych hook.
The first single and most welcoming entry point into Haunted Graffiti’s world is “Round and Round,” with its low, simmering beat and strutting bass line, left-turn interludes, and big, big chorus (“Hold on / I’m calling…”) sung with a surprising lack of pretense or obfuscation. On “Beverly Kills”, he invokes the spacey funk of Parliament and Funkadelic with a falsetto-ed tune about the perils of being a weird person in L.A. (see what I mean about Beck?)—“Beverly kills the freaks / with her bow and arrow”—and ends with the actual freakery of random animal sounds. “Butt-House Blondies” represents another abrupt shift, combining the heavy riffage of early-90s grunge with verses that sound like they’re being sung by Ringo Starr. “Little Wig” plays like The Who at their most prog, but with these wailing, horror film soundtrack sections thrown in between guitar vamps. The soft rock ballad of “Can’t Hear My Eyes” and the jazzy instrumental “Reminiscences” are followed by the concluding 1-2 punch of “Menopause Man,” in which the gender politics of glam rock morphs into disturbing castration anxiety (“Make me maternal, fertile woman / make me menstrual, menopause man”) and “Revolution’s A Lie,” an echoing take on classic first-wave UK punk and post-punk, full of menace and cynicism.
The end of the record fades out slowly in the same way the first track began, which when taken in combination with the sometimes-unclear transitions between songs and sections, gives Before Today a cyclical, never-ending air. This record has been praised as a career best for Pink, a level-jumping nullification of the emergent genres he’s inspired, and even album of the year by some. But I think that cyclical malleability is its greatest compliment. You’ll want to play it over and over again, and Before Today makes that easy.
