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!