The day before Ariel Pink took to the stage at Neumos, I sat in a typical Monday morning stupor as my professor lectured on thermochemistry. “Entropy,” she began to explain, “is the tendency of systems towards disorder.” The particulate nature of matter and its constant random motion, so it goes, tends to produce maximum disorder within natural systems. Mind wandering and addled on too much caffeine, this seemed to me like a fitting analogy. If music is imagined as a microcosm of the universe and its mechanics, then Ariel Pink is entropy incarnate, creating nebulous pink slime from the collision of sonic waves. A truly polarizing figure, Pink and his music emit a charge that attracts some and repulses others in equal measure. Being a diehard Haunted Graffiti fan, my mind trudged through the rest of Monday and Tuesday in anticipation of Pink’s set at Neumos.
I strolled into Neumos on Tuesday night lightly fevered and intoxicated as Pink’s opener, Jack Name, wrapped up his set. Sounding like a baffling hybrid between Connan Mockasin and Brian Eno with traces of a young David Bowie, Name played a compelling set of eccentric ambient pop.
As I waited for Pink’s set I was lost as to what I was soon to experience. What kind of show can you expect from an artist who once had a mental meltdown at Coachella, refusing to sing while his band jammed through the highlights of Before Today, and whose early live show was referred to as “an experiment in driving two-thirds of the audience out the door” by the New York Times? It’s not that I hold Coachella or the Times’ music coverage in high esteem, but from everything I’d heard previously Ariel Pink’s music seemed incompatible with live performance. With each passing moment drawing closer to Pink’s set, I could feel Neumos inundating with grease, reaching critical mass in my arteries and running down my face.
After what felt like an excruciating amount of time, Pink shuffled onto stage with his Haunted Graffiti backing band close behind. Looking like a dumpy Kurt Cobain donned in your grandmother’s most provocative bingo garb, Pink sported a healthy potbelly and a wide grin. “Fuck, I forgot my cucumber,” he stated with a nod to the audience and no further explanation, and jumped straight into tracks from Pom pom. From “White Freckles” to “Put Your Number In My Phone,” tracks I felt mostly ambivalent towards on the album were powerfully realized on stage. Contrasting the dynamic sound, Pink played from behind the wide frames of a pair of reflective aviators, seemingly disconnected from the live experience as the smoke machines ran on full blast and obscured the room. I couldn’t help but imagine this as Ariel Pink in the recording booth, shaking his hips and tapping a single drumstick to the beat as he sang verse after verse. Pink’s aura of apathy seemed to be his self-mythologizing character taken to its furthest reaches, in utter disassociation with everything and everyone around him, lost in whatever fever-dream laid behind those reflective lenses.
Tracks like “Lipstick” and “Dayzed Inn Daydreams” sounded gorgeous live, and “Black Ballerina” turned the room into a greasy raunch-fest à la the “#1 strip club in LA,” but the biggest highlight for me was “Menopause Man,” a favorite off of Before Today where Pink transitions immaculately from deadpan verses to a captivating, gargantuan chorus.
For “Picture Me Gone,” a melancholic 21st century lament for the passing of everything analog, precious, and physical in the age of iPads and selfie sticks, Pink briefly arose from behind his aviators, making first contact with the room. As if dropped from the 60s into the befuddling landscape of 21st century life, Pink peered across the crowd with a palpable air of catharsis. Just as soon as he had sang out the last words to “Picture Me Gone,” the aviators went back on and once again Pink seemed far away from the sweaty room as he played his last few tracks.
For the encore Pink strode back onto stage, this time with a cucumber in hand. Alternating between casual bites of cucumber, Pink and Haunted Graffiti jammed out “Bright Lit Blue Skies,” a fantastic cover from Before Today of the 1966 song by the Rockin’ Ramrods. Concluding the show, Pink brought us headfirst back into the debauchery with “Sexual Athletics,” which begins with Pink bragging about his sexual prowess over a funky bass line “They call it sexual athletics / It doesn’t rhyme with anything / That’s why I’m the sex king / Sex king on a velvet swing . . .” and concludes ridiculously with the somber repetition of “all I wanted was a girlfriend all my life.”
Ariel Pink has come far since his days of obsessively churning out lo-fi tape upon tape in a rundown Hindu ashram turned heroin den. Since rising from complete obscurity he has never failed to indulge every facet of his own eccentrism, and will undoubtedly continue to toy with the concepts of self-mythology, megalomania, and sexuality as he grazes against the sexual economy of American capitalism. Who knows what lies projected behind Ariel Pink’s sunglass lenses; is it Hunter Thompson’s infamous wave, rolling down the coast of Southern California? That wave may have broken in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but Pink seems compelled to piece it back together into a chaotic pastiche, reanimating it into a Frankenstein-ed sonic landscape, glued together with pink slime. In any case, I’m happy just to sit by and watch the spectacle.
Dylan Gnatz / Vandelay Industries / Sea Lion Enthusiast / KXSU Staff Writer