Ariel Pink - Worn Copy (Remastered) (2020)

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti's official debut, The Doldrums, won praise for having the Animal Collective's graces and for being an uncanny perversion of the Me Decade pop-radio that worshipped the golden calves of Dylan, McCartney, Carpenter, and Orlando. Pink's second album, Worn Copy, furthers his cult-baiting mystique as a bedroom hermit from suburban L.A. who conjures up ghosts by burning a roll of avocado-green shag carpet un-vacuumed for 30 years.

To his credit, Pink has sharpened his songwriting and studio touches-- he has several 1970s AOR-pop Muzak formulas nailed, making his freakitude compelling and digestible. That's a quality Ween and Redd Kross sometimes failed to capture-- quotation marks were clearly and fashionably marked on their odes to that decade's trash culture. But the problem remains that if the fashionably shoddy production values are removed from the sound, Pink's music would melt into the air.

Still, Worn Copy's first half is a gas. Opener "Trepanated Earth" begins with a hazy, synth and flanged guitar. Pink then mumbles something romantic before one of his split personalities interrupts, "The human race is a pile of dogshit!" and "Mankind is a Nazi!" After a few false starts and jumbled rickets, he then becomes a charming easy-listening opening act for the Wings 75 tour. "Immune to Emotion" is nasally congested "I'm OK, You're OK" pop that could serve as country club luncheon entertainment. "Jules Lost His Jewels" is a 33rpm power-pop raveup cranked or "Alvin-ized" (as composer John Oswald might put it) to 45 with bloodlines that can be traced to the Mothers of Invention's "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance".

Oddly, albums such as The Doldrums, Worn Copy and House Arrest were not widely embraced initially, though their inventiveness and strange beauty was usually recognized by reviewers, if not begrudgingly. Critical opinion was divided: Ariel Pink was either a self-indulgent “weirdo” or a pop music genius.

Twenty years on, Ariel’s music still stupefies. The quantity of ideas and moods expressed through a modest recording enterprise seems supernatural, not human. Indeed, Hedi El Kohlti, in his superb new liner notes for Underground, compares Ariel’s explosive creative period between 1998 and 2004 to a character in Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly who has all of 20th century modern art beamed into his brain at flash cut speed. Did Ariel Pink, at the age of 20, receive a similar instantaneous “download” of all of the secrets of pop music?