Music
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MUTATED POP ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI Stereo, Glasgow, Thu 8 Nov
Ariel Pink recently declared in an interview, ‘If I could i nd another Ariel to perform my songs, I gladly would.’ For someone who pathologically enjoys tying interviewers in knots, this sentiment actually rings true. Pink is like the Pied Piper of mutated pop, leading his audience a merry dance. But instead of calling the tune, you get the sense he would prefer to watch from the outside and study exactly how his scuzzy, dirtpool sketches with an FM-rock sheen can both enchant and repel, sometimes simultaneously. He would savour the chance to be a voyeur on his own creepy, sweet and sordid musical peepshow.
There is certainly a fairytale element to Pink and his cohorts
Haunted Grafi ti, but it’s of the Revolting Rhymes variety. He lived for an extended period like a troll in LA, doing drugs and recording no-i weirdo CDRs with a coterie of LA deadbeats. Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label took a punt on his dilapidated genius and after 2010’s Before Today breakout album on 4AD he entered mainstream indie consciousness. Now he’s regarded as a visionary by some and a chancer by others, but by common consent he has carved out a niche for outré pop cherry-picking – creating, with his Haunted Grafi ti band, a unique, oddball homebrew of queer jams that vary wildly from cut-glass heartbreakers to skittish psych theatrics.
The group’s latest effort, Mature Themes, resides in that same grimy, cordoned-off, crawlspace, like a VHS that has fallen behind the couch, and melds Pink’s bizarro world musings with sometimes virtuous, often off-kilter accompaniment, always rooted in the otherworldly. Live is often a coin toss – in Pink’s chaotic world, band members come and go, and performances teeter on the brink of bedlam, sometimes tumbling off the edge. Other times it might run relatively seamlessly. Is that what his audience wants? Or do they want to be led astray? (Mark Keane)
EXPOSURE
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHEDELIA ANIMAL COLLECTIVE O2 ABC, Glasgow, Wed 7 Nov
Will Merriweather Post Pavilion, comfortably Animal Collective’s most commercially successful album in nine attempts to date, ultimately prove their happy accident? It pushed the American purveyors of strange, soupy, experimental neo-psychedelia onto the Billboard Top 20 and the verge of an unlikely mainstream infiltration. And yet, despite positive reviews, sales of follow- up Centipede Hz have been very slow by comparison.
An altogether harsher listen than its blissed-out, upbeat and relatively
accessible predecessor, it’s a grower that makes substantial demands of the patient listener but pays off in transcendent style – which is to say, normal AnCo service has been resumed. Let’s not forget this quartet of Baltimore former schoolfriends’ historically wildly eclectic and cacophonous approach to noisemaking – its early sound was received by one record label with the words: ‘This music makes our dogs run out of the room!’ Certain elements of Centipede Hz suggest a deliberate harkening back to
pre-Merriweather traditions – the return of guitarist Deakin for the first time since 2007, for instance, and working out of a rehearsal space just blocks from where they grew up. Listen hard enough and at the heart of Centipede Hz are some straightforward verse/chorus tunes – albeit buried beneath layers of discordant noise, chattering voices and radio static. It feels like an endeavour to fold the more ‘songs’-based format, developed since 2007’s Strawberry Jam, back into a sensory, cerebral and plainly arty aesthetic. Viewed in relation to recent projects such as a retina-scorching ‘visual album’ ODDSAC and a ‘kinetic’ live installation at the Guggenheim, Centipede Hz probably fits more with AnCo’s weird grand design than Merriweather ever did. (Malcolm Jack)
JOSEPHINE FOSTER
How best to describe Miss Foster’s warbling psych-folk voice . . . Swooning. Vibrating? ‘Morriconean’, as one reviewer put it? The Coloradan singer chats to The List before her Glasgow date, touring with a live band including Trembling Bells’ Alex Neilson on drums.
You’ve worked as a funeral singer and wedding singer. What was the tougher gig? Both can be hard work. I once played harp for a wedding at the haunted Stanley Hotel near Rocky Mountain Park, where Steven King was inspired to write The Shining. It was freezing cold and my fingers felt like icicles, I thought the strings of the harp were going to break them off.
Your singing and songwriting have been compared to Patti Smith and Jefferson Airplane. Any other comparisons you’ve appreciated? A recurring comment I receive is, ‘you sound like a theremin’. I finally tried playing a theremin for the first time last summer and it was a lot of fun. I was able to play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ on my first try. However, that was probably beginner’s luck. Recent album Blood Rushing covers ‘elemental themes of love, with a melancholy joy that casts a shadow of desire and loss.’ What was on your mind as you wrote it? It was not written at any one time, but spread out over the last seven years, so it’s more a collection of songs that seemed to speak to me from the same world and had the arc of a story.
You made the front cover of The Wire not long ago. How do you feel about that public side of your career? Do you like doing interviews and photoshoots? I’m grateful to be a musician, and it seems to help all those involved to do this. However, it would be dishonest to say I enjoy it much, excepting the occasional radio interview when I find myself laughing and joking with the host. (Claire Sawers) ■ Josephine Foster plus guests, Saramago Cafe, CCA, Glasgow, Thu 25 Oct.
18 Oct–15 Nov 2012 THE LIST 85