Dressed with a striped red and white hoodie, extremely tight jeans and keeping his Cobain’s sunglasses in the dark all the time, the washed blond haired Ariel Pink was sipping his beer bottle and was speaking some incomprehensible monologue because of the considerable amount of reverb coming from his mic; I just understood him saying at one point ‘I hate myself, like you! …. What’s wrong with me?,,, sobriety!’, and later on a ‘Mom is here,… no she isn’t!’
But, obviously, you don’t go to an Ariel Pink’s concert for the talking or the vocals, or if you do, it would be in a perverse kind of way, since his vocals go from murmurs to high-pitched harmonies and long howls.
His collection of sounds is all over the place, so over the place you may get lost, quite fast, but it’s not such a bad place to get lost if you like the weird and the unexpected. The guitars are either buoyant or quite abrasive, whereas the distant vocals are not necessarily following what’s going on, and the whole thing sounds like a weird agglomeration of sounds moving on their own, bringing you to a deranged journey, keeping you off balance all the time.
After the first song, I was expected to be completely bored, but suddenly I realized I was not bored at all. Sure I got lost and confused at times, but there was enough interesting ideas and hidden grooves to stay and to get curious from one song to another one. I would even say some of these grooves have a true potential to grow, like the catchy guitar riff on ‘One on one’ which sounded almost like a Jim Morrison’s song,… an acquired taste? Sure!
Most of the times, the music seemed to be a combination of lo-fi-disco-funk and something else, but without knowing much about him and being not very familiar with his music, (I just had read that many blogs had praised his last album, and that Pitchfork had even given it a 9/10 rating!) it was pretty hard to make sense of this something else: Psychedelic new wave? Vintage garage rock? Avant-garde noise pop? I think you could multiply the words and adjectives for Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and be always right, except for cliché or trite.
His Cobain look may not have been a complete coincidence: I heard a girl behind me saying in the middle of the show ‘I love him so much!’ and it sounded much more like a declaration of love to the man than to the music. There is effectively a somewhat semi-tragic-semi-heroic figure attached to his persona, which transpires behind the haze of the music. After all, this is someone who stayed completely underground for the longest time, recording hundreds and hundreds of songs on cassettes and CD-Rs at home, before being signed by Paw Tracks, Animal Collective’s label, and then to 4AD records. And even now, who knows about him?
Many have said his last album, ‘Before Today’ is less lo-fi and more accessible work than his previous work, and on Friday night, he really showed his songs were truly accessible to people, who were dancing on the fast and retro ‘Bright Lit Blue Skies’ or simply enjoying themselves on ‘Gettin’ High in the Morning’ and its weird sonic twister.
Os Mutantes, who had opened the show, came back on stage to sing and especially dance on probably Ariel Pink’s most well-known song, the disco-nonchalant ‘Round and Round’, and everyone seemed happy and jubilant, everyone hugging everyone, Sergio Dias even falling on stage from excitement.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpY5bVGhNHg&fs=1&hl=en_US]