Keeping track of a band’s changing line-up can be hard enough, but Ariel Pink has made matters especially difficult, for fans and for himself. As he hits the road supporting his latest release, House Arrest (Paw Tracks), he has no first-hand experience with any of the many bands who will backing him on 23 tour stops that include O’Brien’s this Wednesday, February 22. At each show, Pink will be accompanied — for at least part of the gig — by a band from that city who responded to an invite he sent out on February 2.
“I haven’t taken the easy road,” he admits from his home in LA. But he never has. From his earliest adolescent impulses to make music, the now 27-year-old one-man band — born Ariel Rosenberg — focused on home-recorded tape experiments, not live performance. “It’s hard to me to think of a song as something where I pick up a guitar and write it out, with lyrics, and then play it from beginning to end. For me, the song only exists when I press ‘record.’ ”
Pink fashioned his sound in isolation. He first attracted an audience via self-released albums; there followed a series of discs on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, and eventually he found himself in a pickle when he had to perform. As a band, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti — the official name he records under — was just a figment of his imagination.
“At first, I tried to go out with a band. That was hard, and things were shabby.” But over the course of four tours last year, Pink took on a clutch of sidemen who performed his disparate songs so well that most got other offers and eventually left to pursue them. So he’s been doing “the self-karaoke thing,” where tracks are lifted from his recordings minus the vocals and keyboards and he supplies those live. The result is effective enough, but it lacks the chemistry of a band. So on February 2, the APB went out: “Be Ariel Pink’s Backing Band for a Day!”
“The whole concept is, learn any songs you like and I will hop in on vocals,” he explains. “That’s the element of chance that I’m willing to work with.” It’s a daunting proposition given the range of Pink’s material, but it has opened the challenge up to equally varied applicants. “Hardcore Pops Are Fun,” the opening cut on Haunted Graffiti, is a woozy concoction of power pop and something akin to Soweto township jive; the ragged “Gettin’ High in the Morning” underscores Pink’s affection for both ’80s-era hair metal and experimental noise groups like Cabaret Voltaire. And though muddled fidelity and oddball production are essential to a Pink recording, he does write real songs. “Ariel tries hard to extend his songs beyond the four-chord-verse/four-chord-chorus template, and he does it well,” opines Casey Keenan, guitarist for the Carlisle Sound, the local band who’ll join Pink on stage at O’Brien’s. “Like Laura Nyro, or Kurt Heasley of Lilys, Ariel’s songs are non-linear in their approach but wonderful pop songs in their finished state.”
