Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: "Can't Hear My Eyes"

Listening to Ariel Pink is like painting a room in Switzerland while, three rooms away, an obscure ’80s hits station plays on a boombox with blown speakers and a busted volume knob. In other words, it actually sounds shitty, unlike Wavves or Times New Viking or other cultural colonists whose parents stock the basement bar where they hang out and think of ways to make their punk-pop sticky enough to get caught in critics’ neckbeards.

While there’s always a place for pure antisocial inspiration in the hearts of “authentic” older brothers everywhere, what happens if you move the boombox two rooms closer and figure out a way to fix the volume? What if the radio station did some revolutionary study and figured out how to play only the stuff that lurks in our collective subconscious but which no one has actually heard outside the hours of 1-5 AM? What that if that Pink dude actually got a band with a horn section?

Well, it happened, and I can’t stop listening to it. Everybody’s always trying to throwback to something but when you’ve let the slightly-off mainstream stuff from another era really get under your skin you just sweat it out. The chord changes are songsmithy without being placeable, the synths feel like Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction” video, and the horns give off the vibe of 1978 without being as overbearing as they actually used to be. Best of all, the general fuzziness has been softened and subtled-out so it sounds more like you’re half-asleep than in the eighth circle of hell.

In other words: I used to be hesitant about this guy, but now I salivate slightly whenever I think about what the next full-length will sound like. Something like Chic having a seance with the dudes from Talk Talk. I gotta take a cold shower.