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