Los Angeles’s prodigal songwriting son Ariel Pink shares his eleventh studio album, Dedicated to Bobby Jameson. The album’s title makes a direct and heartfelt reference to a real-life L.A. musician, long presumed dead, who resurfaced online in 2007 after 35 reclusive years to pen his autobiography and tragic life story in a series of blogs and YouTube tirades.

Standout tracks from Dedicated to Bobby Jameson include “Feels Like Heaven,” a lovelorn insta-classic paying tribute to the promise of romance, “Another Weekend,” which encapsulates the lingering euphoria of a regrettable weekend over the edge, “Dedicated to Bobby Jameson,” a rah-rah psych romp paying homage to L.A.’s punk history, and “Time to Live,” an ironic anti-suicide anthem that promotes survival as a form of resistance before devolving into a grungy, “Video Killed the Radio Star”-style breakdown that supposes life and death as being more or less the same fate and embraces the immortal anarchy of a rock song as an alternative to the prison of reality.

Alternately contained and sprawling, Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is a shimmering pop odyssey that represents more astonishing peaks and menacing valleys in the career of a man who, through sheer originality and nerve, has become an American rock and roll institution. The album marks his first full-length release with the Brooklyn-based label Mexican Summer.

TRACK LISTING

1. Time To Meet Your God
2. Feels Like Heaven
3. Death Patrol
4. Santa's In The Closet
5. Dedicated To Bobby Jameson
6. Time To Live
7. Another Weekend
8. I Wanna Be Young
9. Bubblegum Dreams
10. Dreamdate Narcissist
11. Kitchen Witch
12. Do Yourself A Favor
13. Acting

DISC 2 (Deluxe Edition Only)
1. Nighttime Is Great !
2. Lil' Birdie Told Me
3. Non-Sequitur Segues

Los Angeles’s prodigal songwriting son Ariel Pink shares his eleventh studio album, Dedicated to Bobby Jameson. The album’s title makes a direct and heartfelt reference to a real-life L.A. musician, long presumed dead, who resurfaced online in 2007 after 35 reclusive years to pen his autobiography and tragic life story in a series of blogs and YouTube tirades. Standout tracks from Dedicated to Bobby Jameson include “Feels Like Heaven,” a lovelorn insta-classic paying tribute to the promise of romance, “Another Weekend,” which encapsulates the lingering euphoria of a regrettable weekend over the edge, “Dedicated to Bobby Jameson,” a rah-rah psych romp paying homage to L.A.’s punk history, and “Time to Live,” an ironic anti-suicide anthem that promotes survival as a form of resistance before devolving into a grungy, “Video Killed the Radio Star”-style breakdown that supposes life and death as being more or less the same fate and embraces the immortal anarchy of a rock song as an alternative to the prison of reality. Alternately contained and sprawling, Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is a shimmering pop odyssey that represents more astonishing peaks and menacing valleys in the career of a man who, through sheer originality and nerve, has become an American rock and roll institution. The album marks his first full-length release with the Brooklyn-based label Mexican Summer.

Across its 17 tracks and 69 minutes, pom pom is unfiltered Ariel, a pied piper of the absurd, with infectious tales of romance, murder, frog princes and Jell-O. The record sees the Los Angeles native strike it out alone, returning to the solo moniker he has adopted for well over a decade when cementing his name as a king of pop perversion.

From demented kiddie tune collaborations with the legendary Kim Fowley (songs like ‘Jell-O’ and ‘Plastic Raincoats In The Pig Parade’ were written with Fowley in his hospital room during his recent battle with cancer), to beatific, windswept pop (‘Put Your Number In My Phone’, ‘Dayzed Inn Daydreams’), scuzz-punk face-melters (‘Goth Bomb’, ‘Negativ Ed’), and carnival dub psychedelia (‘Dinosaur Carebears’), pom pom could very well be Ariel Pink’s magnum opus.

“Although this is the first “solo” record credited to my name, it is by far the least “solo” record I have ever recorded.” – Ariel Pink.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Brilliance mixed with utter daftness. It's a 'White Album' for our times.

An absorbing look at Ariel Rosenberg's early musique concrète epic. All songs written, recorded and produced by Ariel Pink. 
Restoration and mastering by Alain at One Million Mangos Berlin. "As with stored memories one has acquired early in life, Thrash and Burn survives for me less as a finished piece of music in/itself or even a moment captured in time; more a catalog of lifetimes, each piece unique and unnamed, together they recall glimpses of forgotten future-pasts; in cosmology, as one peers ever deeper into the void, first beyond the fixed population density of stars nestled in a 'suburb' at the outer edge of our galaxy, into an evermore all encompassing blackness surrounding a thin lane of galaxies, one heads off in one direction, floating along a lonely string of Christmas lights which recede with the distance. Much further downstream, a giant wall of light scaffolding fades into view. That is destiny's orphan multiverse inhabiting a single frame in its infancy. In time, we would transcend it. From where we stand our footsteps recede and fade into the darkness. But our beginnings are not lost; for someone standing off and above our horizon, in a human ear much more young, the secret of our coming of age shall be preserved revealed and discovered yet once again...." - Ariel Pink, November 2012.

Thrash and Burn dates from a time when Ariel Rosenberg, then a few years from turning "Pink", first proclaimed himself a "20th Century Composer", without a trace of irony in his voice. Appropriately, this early work takes the form of a musique concrète epic forged from Rosenberg's late-90's faux-primitif, garage-punk, and tape-loop experiments. At 94 minutes and 36 tracks, Thrash and Burn displays the symphonic ambitions of his genre-devouring pop saga, Haunted Graffiti, but with little in the way of fastidious album-oriented constructions. Rather, Thrash and Burn is a free-form tape ramble that uses gauzy atmospherics to strike up a wicked dialogue with the likes of Rosenberg's non-pop influences, like Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari. (In particular, Schaeffer's "Symphonie pour un homme seul" seems to get plenty of nods here.) Thrash and Burn was discovered in 2005, in an ankle-deep pile of cracked cassettes and scratched CD-R's in Rosenberg's Beverly Hills flat. Grier and Rosenberg then made an initial reconstruction attempt, and Thrash and Burn became a 4-cassette box set for the inaugural release of Human Ear Music, in 2006. The Wikipedia page for Thrash and Burn places its origin sometime in 1998. Thrash and Burn was remastered in September 2012 in Berlin, Germany. The final master was brought up to 24 bit resolution, dynamically and tonally balanced on an Apogee Rosetta and two solid-aluminum monoblock amps.

TRACK LISTING

Disc #1
1/Shoes
2/Foul Play
3/Pleasure Spot 1 (Sweet Jane Rock N Roll)
4/Innagecko
5/I Disguise You
6/Cemetary Suite
7/Starry Eyes
8/Those Were The Days (Now I'm 21)
9/Disco MIA AKA Bust A Move
10/Nothing At All / Different Names
11/Memorial
12/Brother Sister
13/Funeral
14/Leggos
15/Double Jeopardy
16/Red Vinyl
17/Feel It With Your Landlord
18/White Rain In The Windy Summer

Disc #2
1/White Rain Reprise
2/On The Beach
3/The Andalusian
4/Half Girls Half Boys
5/Cry Yourself To Sleep (12 Minute Overture)
6/Rita Mae Brown
7/50 Cents
8/Cuz You're Dead (Lester Bangs)
9/Dawn
10/Pleasure Spot 3 - See You Are
11/Rainy Den
12/Red Room
13/Pleasure Spot 2 - Lucinda Cunt
14/Equus
15/You Die Slowly And Then You Die
16/Kamikaze
17/I Won't See You Again
18/Life Song

West Coast natives Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti present ‘Mature Themes’, the follow-up to 2010’s hugely successful album, ‘Before Today’.

‘Before Today’ was the band’s 4AD debut, offering the first sign that the intriguingly scatalogical music Ariel had been making for over a decade was finally ossifying into a coherent form. Indeed, the lead song from ‘Before Today’ - the inimitable ‘Round And Round’ - was awarded Pitchfork’s Track Of The Year for 2010, and further plaudits were heaped upon the album as it cropped up in near-all end-of-year polls. For many it seemed that Ariel had finally reached the wider audience his early recordings had hinted was possible. And with ‘Mature Themes’, Haunted Graffiti have forged a record that raises the bar once again.

Installing themselves in a studio space in downtown-LA, Haunted Graffiti began a lengthy process of writing and recording. ‘Mature Themes’ is a self-produced affair, with former member Cole MGN drafted in to provide some drum programming and additional mixing duties.

Far removed from Ariel’s early bedroom recordings, ‘Mature Themes’ is a product of a more collaborative process, with the oftenoverlooked virtuoso musicianship of the band bought to the fore. “There are definitely not any links to my lo-fi origins”, Ariel recently told Spin magazine. “It’s so diverse but so different from anything I’ve done before. In a sense, it’s really the record I wanted to make back when I made ‘Before Today’, but couldn’t. We had time to let our hair down and try new things.”

While the creative process was new, familiar Ariel Pink signatures remain. In fact, ‘Mature Themes’ feels like the definitive Haunted Graffiti record, a patchwork of modern America, its esoteric reference points and moments of lyrical lucidity a twilight excursion through backwater LA and late-night TV channel hopping.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Sheer brilliance. Often absurd and lyrically insane, but crammed full of so many melodic detours and crazy ideas, that you can only marvel at his inventiveness. It's refreshing that this guy never seems to take himself seriously, but with music as inspiring and unique as this, we definitely should do. He's a (twisted) superstar!

For the best part of a decade, Los Angeles native Ariel Rosenberg aka Ariel Pink has been carving some of the most intoxicating music going, a reclusive pop surrealist whose corroded productions have led to a cult following that has often been difficult to keep up with.

With roots going back as far as 1996, West Coast act Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti are as sublime as they are surreal, with a sound loaded with hazy nostalgia and a fiercely experimental pop palette. From the "Haunted Graffiti" series (from which the full band’s name is now derived), which featured the likes of "Worn Copy" (2005) and "House Arrest" (2006), Ariel Pink has established himself as one of the most prolific songwriters of his generation, a visionary producer in the vein of Joe Meek and Ariel’s hero and previous collaborator, tape deck dilettante R. Stevie Moore.

To date Pink’s most celebrated release – and one that summarises the erratic nature of his output, pieced together from various periods – is "The Doldrums", released on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks imprint in 2004, yet recorded and mixed by Ariel in his bedroom on an 8-track in the late 90s.

No longer a bedroom venture, Haunted Graffiti are now a fully realised band, comprised of Kenny Gilmore (keys / guitar / vocals), Aaron Sperske (drums / vocals) and Tim Koh (bass / vocals), all characters from the underground LA scene.

The album took nearly six months to complete, with around half of the record completed with Sunny Levine at the dials (the rest being self-produced and recorded), plus engineer Rik Pekkonen, who previously recorded many great 70s acts including Bill Withers, Seals & Crofts and Bread, all on show as "Before Today" muddles glam rock, West Coast funk and Merseybeat harmonies.

For such a unique act, Haunted Graffiti manage to weave such a beguiling range of influences into their music. They can veer from the demented heavy metal of "Butt-House Blondies" to the classic synth-rock of "I Can’t Hear My Eyes", "Revolution’s A Lie" with its pulsating motorik tints to their cover "Bright Lit Blue Skies" (originally recorded by the Rocking Ramrods in 1966).

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: The sun-kissed hit of the summer, there's something for everyone here - 70s soft rock, West Coast funk, synth-rock, motorik pulses and golden harmonies. Totally brilliant!