Ariel Pink's music began its strange journey early in the last decade, as a CD-R lying on the floor of Animal Collective's tour van. Before then, he'd been heard by almost no one, despite that he'd recorded hundreds of songs, by himself, in what sounded like a windowless dungeon. The quality of those early recordings was poor, but something shone from the murk: Pink became the first artist signed to the band's Paw Tracks label, which reissued his album The Doldrums in 2004. The path of his career since then has been wayward and strange, culminating in the highly professional Before Today in 2010. But there are through-lines. Whether you tuned into his world during the Paw Tracks era or after Before Today's "Round and Round" became an indie anthem, you probably sensed an intriguing off-note lurking in the L.A. home-recording savant's music.
In Pink's hands, the boundless sunshine of 1970s AM pop grows queasy, even malevolent, splitting the difference between a grimace, a smirk, and a smile. Even at its loveliest, his music radiates a mesmerizing sense of bad faith: Pink often incorporates humor into his songs, but it's hard to be sure if you're in on the joke. He may express seemingly sincere sentiments in one moment while mocking them in the next. In his most compelling material, these impulses curl around each other until his "fuck you's" sound like "I love you", and vice versa.
Before Today was Ariel Pink's breakout record, a leap to a new stage from his cult beginnings that made his skill as a songwriter and craftsman clear. Free of the lo-fi grit that characterized his Paw Tracks material, you could suddenly hear his uncanny knack for fusing together unlikely parts with no visible seams. Mature Themes, Pink's grittier, gristlier, and funnier follow-up, clarifies that Before Today was not a sign of things to come but rather just a signpost along his unknowable path. The production has hardened, as if Pink has found a midpoint between the warped, warbly sound of his tape releases and what he can now afford. The songs themselves, while still catchy, are often opaque, antisocial, and confounding. The mood of the record veers closer to the melted emotional nowhere of The Doldrums' "Good Kids Make Bad Grown Ups" or the arch piss-take of Worn Copy's "Artifact".
As a result, some have pegged Mature Themes as an alienating move meant to prune Pink's flock back down to the diehards. But the album is too rich for that straightforward reading. Here, even his puerile sentiments remain generously melodic and lovingly wrought. "I'm not real and I won't call you," he croons on the title track, over a melody that climbs upward so gracefully it sounds like he's vandalizing a Shaker hymn. It might be one of the truest lines he's ever sung. But the Elvis Costello-like rising-action of the chorus, which takes the phrase "I wanted to be good" up the scale, is an expression of love, pure and simple.
"Only in My Dreams" is another example of his singular songwriting mind: Listen casually and it's a Byrdsian pop tune, but sit down at a piano to map out it's details, and you'll lean back, baffled. If taken apart, no one but Pink would be able to reassemble it. It's this talent that links Pink to past practicioners of outsider music-- R. Stevie Moore, Frank Zappa, Ween. Like those artists, Pink looked at the puzzle pieces of a pop song and figured out jarring new ways they fit together, mingling affection with ironic commentary and intellectual distance. "Kinski Assassin" opens with Pink singing nonsense in a stentorian voice not far from a 1930s radio drama: "Suicide dumplings dropping testicle bombs." Then, he chimes in with something silky and romantic: "We'll always have Paris." The lyrics don't make any more sense together than the music behind them does, but they glide smoothly into each other, conveying a strong sense of internal coherence. It's the kind of bewitching almost-logic that drives people to endlessly re-watch David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire.
But don't look to Pink's lyrics for clues, because they offer few ways to emotionally engage. "The bad breath of a cross-eyed goat/ Eating children for a Monday morning," go the opening lines of "Driftwood", intoned with the seriousness of a Druid. On "Symphony of the Nymph", he speak-sings the song's title in an exaggerated scientist voice straight out of Thomas Dolby's catalogue over a backing track located somewhere between "Monster Mash" and "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah". On "Farewell American Primitive", the sentiment that comes through most clearly is, "Fuck it." It's moments like these that forcefully remind you: There's nothing operatic at stake in Pink's music. It's a Chinese finger trap.
When The Village Voice interviewed Pink in 2010, he suggested that he'd lost the ability to make music the way he did in his earlier, more prolific days. But Mature Themes is as vital as anything he's ever recorded: Even the throwaway "Schnitzel Boogie" fails at being one-dimensional, playing instead like something McCartney might have worked on for the fifth side of the White Album. This seesaw between sincerity and insincerity is the fuel that drives Pink's music. It's the riddle that creates his cult, and it's the reason everyone will continue to pay attention to him, no matter how many faces he pulls.
