Album Review: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today
- Written by Rory Gibb
Is it okay to like slightly tacky soft rock if it’s performed with a knowing wink by a bedroom popster, rather than by a group of painfully earnest young men with bad hair? I couldn’t love Ariel Pink more for forcing people to answer that question.
It’s tempting, when writing about Pink and the legions of new(ish) artists that have followed in his footsteps, to start gushing about the usual tropes attached to chillwave and its ilk. Y’know, ‘half-remembered sounds from childhood’, chatter about hauntology as applied to pop music, obligatory mention of lo-fi as an intentional aesthetic, et cetera.
It would be easy to do so; Ariel Rosenberg’s earlier records were coated in such thick layers of grime and tape distortion that their fragments of pop and soft rock seemed to well up from somewhere deep beneath, transient ghosts that disappeared as soon as they began to take shape. In light of his new album with his Haunted Graffiti band it would remain an easy discussion: much as it’s billed as a journey towards higher fidelity recording, Before Today is still in every way an Ariel Pink album, still drowning in scuzzy noise and still as self-consciously odd as ever. But the differences here are just as crucial; with its softly gleaming surfaces, this is Rosenberg’s pop album, and takes barely a fraction of the effort his previous music often required to love.
That said, if any previous fans were worried Rosenberg might have lost his skewed sense of humour, opener ‘Hot Body Rub’, with its sleazy sax groove, acts as a welome reassurance; his manic, hypersexual jabber might as well be thrusting at the mic stand. Then again, as soon as Haunted Graffiti launch into sixties cover ‘Bright Lit Blue Skies’, any trace of abrasion fades behind its smoothed out powerpop groove. It’s one of a host of songs on here that practically scream out their debt to AM radio ‘adult contemporary’, but then that’s Rosenberg’s talent here: his band manage to take that entire realm of music and turn it into something that it’s not only okay to enjoy, but almost impossible to dislike.
Recent single ‘Round & Round’ – a reworked version of an earlier song, ‘Hold On (I’m Calling)’, though you’d be hard pressed to tell – is a delight, comprised of so many separate parts it seems a wonder that it holds together so well. ‘Butthouse Blondies’ sees him tackle hard rock to utterly demented effect, and ‘I Can’t Hear My Eyes’ is pure yacht rock, even down to the tiniest detail: the blocky keyboard melody and chimes that shimmer away in the background move far beyond mere pastiche and into the realms of straightforward tribute.
Ariel Pink is a real one-off, regardless of his current status as ‘godfather of chillwave’, and the highest praise it’s possible to give Before Today is that it transcends its forebears in every way. While every song manages to crush all its influences into a brilliant single entity, it’s also the first thing he’s done that feels every inch an album. As a complete listen Before Today sounds like a labour of love, carried out without a trace of hipster-ish irony, and it’s all the better for it.