Best Albums of 2014 // Ariel Pink: Pom Pom

Ariel Pink paces frenetically in faded stubbies and purple spike-studded high heels, gesticulating wildly at his crossdressing drummer before telling the audience that they’re all “fucking bogans”. That may have been the most intelligible thing he said all evening; with songs like “Exile on Frog Street” and “Plastic Raincoats at the Pig Parade” filed away in his cannon, intelligibility gives right of way to sheer visceral fun, and it’s all the better for it. 

It was perhaps an odd choice to shed the “Haunted Graffiti” moniker at the dawning of Ariel’s most extravagantly ‘anti-solo’ record, but as with last week’s Kimbra review, I can find no fault with the unbridled maximalism that’s put on display. Like Kimbra, Ariel is just too big for simple solo artistry and with Pom Pom, he’s more willing than ever to step away from the lo-fi home recordings of his earlier career. Where “Mature Themes” seemed to hark back to the Paw Tracks days with its insular, mellow recordings, “Pom Pom” ignites in billowing energy with the most glistening songwriting of his career. At a runtime of over an hour and with a total of 17 tracks, Pom Pom models itself after the bold, double album efforts of pop’s past, sounding like a tribute to the ethos that made The Beach Boys’ “Smile” and The Beatles’ “White Album” such grand artistic visions. It shares all the same hallmarks: catchy highlights, wild variety, silly diversions, experimental structures and a sense of journey and destination. This is an album that takes the listener on a trail through the mind of Ariel himself; a schizophrenic, giddy day-trip.

It would be easy to dismiss tracks like “Goth Bomb” or “Nude Beach a Go-go” as untrimmed fluff but, much like The White Album’s “Piggies” and “Rocky Raccoon”, they add to the bulk of the album and make it the experience it is from start to finish. If it were stripped to only 10 songs it would simply lack magic. 

The middle sequence of the album carries the lion’s share of these tracks and even in their brief runtimes, they dart back and forth through different ideas like a tuning radio. It sounds like a less cluttered and overwrought version of what Animal Collective were trying to create on “Centipede Hz”, except in place of the psychedelic electronics are the staples of a lifetime of eclectic music appreciation. Ariel shifts through surf rock, glam, disco, middle eastern vibes, advertising jingles, children’s tv theme songs, dub, blues, and power-ballads with such fluidity that nothing feels out of place. All expectations of what music should be are left at the door while Ariel is left to flex his formidably flexible mind. We hear what sound’s like pure Roger Waters vocals on the dark and brewing “Four Shadows” and a shimmering, sun-drenched outro on “Sexual Athletics” that resembles an amalgamation of The Beach Boys and Panda Bear. We’re even treated to a homage to The Beatle’s “A Day In The Life” with the orchestral swell of “Exile on Frog Street”. 

Despite these reference points, you would struggle to call this music derivative. Ariel’s sound is unlike anything else while simultaneously being everything else. Like the great works that inspired it, it manages to trace a journey through a tapestry of pop music that feels wholly greater than the sum of its parts.

This is the incredible new video for “Dayzed Inn Daydreams” featuring Rick Wilder of The Mau-Mau’s. Warning: it brings the feels.

You can grab a copy of Pom Pom over at 4AD

Best Albums of 2014 // Kimbra: The Golden Echo

Kimbra sits in an unfortunate middle ground. She doesn’t qualify for the pop adoration of mainstream artists like Taylor Swift and Beyonce and she lacks the subversive cool of truly underground 'pop-smiths' like Ariel Pink and St Vincent. The music sits in between the vitality of radio-friendly “Shake it off” hits and the high brow, art pop of the internet underground, leaving it abandoned somewhere that you might expect to find Florence and the Machine, or Lana Del Rey: entry level alternative. As a result, it remains uncool in the eyes of just about everybody, and no critic has any serious interest in aligning themselves with it. 

Herein lies the problem, because unlike Kimbra’s debut, The Golden Echo is actually really very good. It’s too weird and yet not quirky enough. It’s too complex and not deep enough. It’s too arty and not artistic enough. What it is, however, is good, and undeniably so, such that it makes Kimbra’s uncomfortable place in the music world seem as comfortable as her satin sheathed posture on The Golden Echo's stunning album art.

She reclines like a god with total control over her creative process, dragging the likes of Thundercat, Dave Longstreth, Bilal, and Matt Bellamy (unthinkable choice) into the mix, crafting a collaborative album that remains distinctly solo. There’s more layers happening here than your average Animal Collective record and married with the hollywood pop production, it can seem almost desperately cluttered with ideas. But for the most part, they’re good ideas and they're pedalled to the listener one after the other with seriously impressive efficiency. 

Just listen to the lead single below. Its maybe-ironic radio pop schtick is thunderously overthrown by the hard-hitting chorus and leaves you with a sense that you’re listening to something a bit special; something far removed from it’s safe, entry level contemporaries; and something unfairly burdened by it’s uncool aesthetic. "90s Music" is the sound that movies envisage as the dystopian future of music; hyper-produced and robotic; echoing the songs of the past.

The Golden Echo is a loveable mess and in a musical climate that discourages maximalism, ambition, and virtuosity it needs to be celebrated, if not for simply daring to be fun.




If you're not entirely sold on 90s Music then give Madhouse a listen. It sounds like a cross between Kate Bush and Prince and if that isn't enough to tide you over then this may not be for you...

A First Post

2014, the fairly unassuming year with its share of good releases and its deficit in anything ‘groundbreaking’. The critics hummed and hawed over petty feuds between The War on Drugs and Sun Kil Moon and boring guitar music continued to drone lifelessly from both camps. Like two dads bickering drunkenly to the mild amusement of almost nobody, music journalism picked sides to make a definitive statement in a climate where nothing definitive or statement worthy was happening. 

Socially conscious bloggers drove Ariel Pink’s newest release into a chasm of ‘problematic’ groupthink and strung him high for his complicity in the crimes of the patriarchal state. Commentary surged from all sides with some having the audacity to question, “wait, what was the sexist part?”. Meanwhile, albums were panned after the lippy missteps of their creators and critics proved that they are much more qualified to discuss the social context of music than the music itself, which nobody really remembers anyway. 

In the great year of mouthing off, even the reclusive enigma that is Richard D. James, rose forth from his 7 year hiatus to shed some unwanted light on his belief in the 911 conspiracy. 

I hope this year has taught us to offer art some asylum from it’s unstable environment. It isn’t art’s fault that it grew up around a bunch of assholes. Sometimes the kid with the immature, misogynistic, conspiracy obsessed father can be the most interesting of the lot. 

I can’t say I know what I want from this blog yet but I know I’ll be reviewing music. I can promise that much. And I mean music, the actual sound waves. 

A particular sound!