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CMU Approved
Approved: Ariel Pink – Put Your Number In My Phone
By Aly Barchi | Published on Wednesday 10 September 2014
There aren’t/haven’t ever been many real ‘savant’ pop artists (though you would probably count the late Arthur Russell and Syd Barrett, the live R Stevie Moore and John Maus), but in little lo-fi-pop lord Ariel Pink’s case I’d say the cap fits. The serrated weirdness to even his sweetest-tasting hits, the innate ‘knowing’ shown in AP tracks that both wink back to, and totally go against, the idea of the pop paradigm, the fact that his alias (and maybe his real self as well) is a conceit of strange contradictions – some likeable, some not so – are all savantish trappings that Pink has in spades.
Anyway, the point is that the LA-based Ariel Marcus Rosenburg is back and, at 36 years old, releasing his first LP as Ariel Pink. It’s titled ‘pom pom’ (no capitals), and features tracks like ‘Nude Beach A G-Go’, ‘Sexual Athletics’, ‘Goth Bomb’ and my fave, ‘Exile On Frog Street’, in addition to collaborative ‘assists’ from Pink’s long-time band Haunted Graffiti, and also pop auteur Kim Fowley, who “free-styled” the bones of songs like ‘Jell-O and ‘Plastic Raincoats In The Pig Parade’ whilst in hospital fighting cancer. And why one earth not?
Cheering on ‘pom pom’ ahead of its release via 4AD on 17 Nov is lead single ‘Put Your Number In My Phone’, a track that posits Pink as both a kind of slimeball who takes girls’ digits at Taco trucks then never calls them, and also a kind of sweet and earnest man searching for love, if only by dint of its snowy-white ‘Greensleeves’-style simpleness.
Discover a lot more on Ariel and his world views via this probing Pitchfork interview advertising the new LP, and log ‘Put Your Number…’ if you like, now:
