It seems as though Ariel Pink has beaten "Weird Al" Yankovic to a 69 Love Songs parody. Instead of "Asleep and Dreaming", Pink's debut album, The Doldrums, offers "Among Dreams"; instead of "Strange Eyes" we get "Strange Fires"; instead of "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" we get "The Ballad of Bobby Pyn"; instead of "Bitter Tears" we get "Crying"-- there's a list and it goes on, and the musical side of this hilarious send-up is even more masterful.
Maybe that claim is absolutely cuckoo. I mean, it has to be. There's no way this Hollywood hillbilly called Ariel Pink knows who Stephen Merritt is, and if asked, Pink would surely play Peter and deny the man three times. Either way, I've been trying for weeks now to figure out if Ariel Pink is a genius, an idiot, an idiot savant, or some combination of the three. Everybody's new favorite Collective-- Animal (not Nortec or Soul, though each group had its day)-- clearly seems to think highly of him. So much so, in fact, that Pink's crude and crooked pop affair is Paw Tracks' first non-Animal Collective release. That's quite a vote of confidence.
Everybody's heard these songs before-- they sound straight out of 60s pop radio, 80s shampoo commercials, and 90s soap operas. The melodies themselves are great but worn from overexposure. Yet the songs are secondary to Ariel Pink himself, the oddball who understands these melodies in vastly different terms than the rest of us do and, consciously or not, is dead-set on resurrecting them. The Doldrums isn't a collection of songs so much as an excessive human spectacle-- violently personal and necessarily confrontational. Think autistic kids covering Brian Wilson or Tom Waits singing a nursery rhyme or Shakespeare eating shit in an alley or Jesus giving birth to a pack of bear cubs.
The key to all of these spectacles, of course, is sincerity, and on The Doldrums, Ariel Pink seems pretty goddamn sincere. It's a shtick record, but the self-engrossed Pink probably doesn't think so. Its ultra lo-fi creepiness doesn't feel like a "trick" so much as an unfortunate necessity, as if an eight-track was all Pink could afford. The man is free as a bird with a rocketpack. He shoots off in falsetto with a smile, not a smirk. He pens lyrics that would put Rodd Keith's clientele to hippy-happy shame. He explores keyboard presets that should never make their way outside of the Sam Ash piano room. To be honest, it's all sort of beautiful.
My biggest gripe with The Doldrums is that most of these tracks are twice as long as they should be. Yet, criticizing the songs for their excess completely misses the point. This album can't contain Ariel Pink, and wasn't supposed to, and his next 500 CD-Rs will have the same problem. The songs are secondary to Pink's bourgeoning cult of personality-- the album turns its imperfections into selling points, its pigheadedness into firm resolve.
After opener "Good Kids Make Bad Grown Ups", we understand the supposed appeal of The Doldrums: These are normal songs, except a "crazy" guy is singing them, and he has "crazy" lo-fi production. The rest of the album functions as half endurance test and half a chance for us to find reasons to say, "Oh my god, this guy's a genius!" in that self-congratulatory "it takes a genius to realize genius" sort of way. I'm on the "he's not a genius" side-- Pink just happens to have a traditional pop sensibility but a bleak budget. Then again, maybe it is all shtick. It's a debate that invites endless speculation, further putting the emphasis on Pink while taking it away from the songs themselves.
It follows, then, that the best Ariel Pink songs are the ones that do the least to shape his mystique. "Haunted Graffiti" has the Bee Gees playing a frat party but its warbles and hisses turn the song into a high-stakes peep show. The song's melody succeeds here without being tied down to Pink's off-kilter delivery. "Let's Build a Campfire There" drops the Magnetic Fields parody and cuts straight to mimicry, and it works out nicely. Closer "Young Pilot Astray" follows that same Merritt line, with a fantastically whimsical melody and loads and loads of vocal overdubs for the refrain. Yet, there's something wrong about recommending any of these songs as starting points for Haunted Graffiti virgins: They're the most self-reliant, but they're also the least Pink.
And that's the trouble with The Doldrums, and the reasoning behind this conflicted rating. The album is not so much Ariel Pink's creation as it is Ariel Pink himself, a real-time observation of his brain synapses at work. His nerves are either firing at Einstein levels or misfiring like harlequin babies, and in fairness, I'm hardly the staff brain surgeon.
