Review Summary: Ariel Pink's latest collection is good, but potentially marred by Pink's deliberate weirdness.
Every song Ariel Pink releases is a careful balancing act: too heavy on the arch irony and the track is a joke, too light on the weirdness and the track becomes artless radio-fodder. At his best, Ariel Pink plays songs you wish were on AM radio, right alongside Hall and Oates and Kenny Loggins, but with a sinister twist that makes him enduringly interesting. The question on Mature Themes is does he succeed in that regard?
Yes and no. Pink's major weakness has always been his kitchen sink approach, having a back catalog of dozens of songs all released within the last decade. Many are simply floating in limbo, others are part of a series of “Haunted Graffiti” recordings, some presumably never released. They vary in approach from poorly-recorded rockabilly to poorly-recorded soft R&B.
But the new production sheen first heard on Before Today doesn't change that Pink is a songwriter of varied talents, nor does it hurt his ability to find weird hooks lurking everywhere. “Mature Themes” plays like something between a lost Billy Joel ballad with a little Elvis Costello cynicism. I challenge you to hear “Symphony of the Nymph” more than once and not get the chorus stuck in your head.
“Live it Up” is also a great pop song, surviving on a thin ether of drum machines and floating synths. Even as much of its guts are borrowed from 80s soft rock and new wave, “Live it Up” sounds positively breathless, simply too much fun to care where it came from. It's that hand-me-down toy you got that was no less exciting because your older brother had it first.
Other outlets have called “Round and Round” either a breakout hit or even an anthem, and it's hard not to envision parts of this album as a pointed response to that. Whether it's the logical contortions one has to go through to understand the bizarre chorus of “Symphony of the Nymph” or the indiscernible muck that surrounds “Early Birds of Babylon,” there are a lot of head-scratchers here.
But too often, as on “Schnitzel Boogie,” the genre-borrowing becomes tired and irritating. When Ariel tosses off couplets like “The bad breath of a cross-eyed goat/ Eating children for a Monday morning,” it is either charming or utterly forgettable, usually the latter. Sometimes Ariel simply sounds utterly bored, which works on some songs with a little bite, but causes the album to drag overall.
The ultimate Pink dilemma is the one that dogged Zappa and Ween and even Todd Rundgren. How do you imbue your music with irony without sounding detached, without turning the whole endeavor into an unfunny punchline? I think the answer was always balance, and ultimately, Pink is capable of gymnastic feats of balancing. Here the balance went a little awry, but this is not a weak album. This is simply an album that could have been sharper, with irony more purposeful.
