Before Today

Most people who follow Ariel Pink were introduced to him by 2004's The Doldrums, the first non-Animal Collective release on that band's Paw Tracks label. From the beginning, Pink was presented as an outsider, a recluse who obsessively recorded at home and had compiled hundreds of unheard songs. The notion that he was a supremely strange person making music in his own world was fully supported by the string of albums, singles, and EPs that followed. First, there was the music itself, which saw Pink using an ultra lo-fo recording set-up to re-imagine cheesy AM radio jingles and lost new wave tracks as surreal, art-damaged pop. His music could be bizarre and disturbing, with warped voices and dark subject manner evoking loneliness, bad drugs, and alienation; it could also be sweet and even sincere, celebrating the pleasure of a well-rendered verse melody and a good chorus.

A Californian leftfield lo-fi mainstay, Ariel Pink has been recording resolutely non-commercial music since the early 2000s, initially on Animal Collective's Paw Prints label. Now signed to 4AD for album number nine, a more polished incarnation is unveiled.

There’s a passage in Bill Drummond’s The 17 where he recalls traveling to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s, ostensibly to oversee the work of a hair metal band in his capacity as an A&R man for WEA. While trying to find the group in a labyrinthian studio complex, Drummond stumbled across a bloated Stevie Nicks, who was dancing eyes-closed to one of her own songs, lost to herself and the world. Ther e are many styles covered on this, the first album by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti since signing to 4AD, but that glassy Fleetwood Mac production, which flourished on Rumours, gloriously saturated their sound on Tusk, and continued to be an obsession for Lindsey Buckingham on later hits such as ‘Big Love’, is glazed all over Before Today.

Sometimes I like to imagine what Ariel Pink is like on a day off — polishing off a Veggie Delight and sipping a Diet Coke at Subway, maybe watching It's Complicated on the sofa with his mom. These scenes are utterly hilarious to me, because few artists have worn their outsider status as proudly and boldly as Pink. The erratic live showings (see this performance for Viva Radio), the blusterous remarks about Jewish identity to Heeb magazine, the generally disheveled and outlandish personal style — they've all served to mark Pink as too weird, too wonky, too off-center to be lumped in with the fashion-focused, cool-conscious crowd his new album, Before Today, is being marketed to (seriously, do we have to call it chillwave?).

There’s probably nothing I can say about Ariel Pink that hasn’t been said better by Mike Powell, my nomination for Pink biographer should the occasion arise. An early champion of works like The Doldrums and House Arrest by Pink and his imaginary band the Haunted Graffiti, Powell nevertheless grew weary of the seemingly endless array of home-recorded reissues that surfaced after his first appearance on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks imprint. It has been said that Pink has not released any new material since 2004, meaning that his entire sojourn into the spotlight and under the microscope occurred during a time when he wasn’t even writing music (This isn’t entirely true; there was a brief stint in the scatological side projects Holy Shit and Shits and Giggles). As the archives grew dry, it seemed like Pink was destined to fade, as he himself had decidedly preordained. His lost basement pop/ obscured-photo/ tattered record sleeve persona seemed as much a deterministic rule as an autonomous construct.