ARIEL PINK - Underground 2LP

Ariel Archives revisits ARIEL PINK's historic run of albums as ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI with a series of definitive reissues and new collections. The first installment begins with Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2, a long-awaited second volume of outtakes and non-album tracks, Underground, the inaugural album in the Haunted Graffiti series, and finally Loverboy, an exemplary disc recorded between October 2001 and July 2002, at which time Ariel also recorded House Arrest. Twenty years on, Ariel’s music still stupefies. The quantity of ideas and moods expressed through a modest recording enterprise seems supernatural, not human. Indeed, HEDI EL KOHLTI in his superb new liner notes for Underground, compares Ariel’s explosive creative period between 1998 and 2004 to a character in Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly who has all of 20th century modern art beamed into his brain at flash cut speed. Did Ariel Pink, at the age of 20, receive a similar instantaneous “download” of all of the secrets of pop music?