Where bought? Loathe as I sometimes am to buy online via Norman Records (they're a great independent stockist with a peerless selection from a UK buyer's perspective, but their descriptions of records they actually sell can be annoying - often records I am interested in buying - can be very much in the record store asshole mould) I got this through them. Took a while because of the pandemic but they were very good via email.
If you're not a fan of Ariel Pink then you'd be advised to turn your RSS off for the next few entries. One of many things I find interesting about Mr. Rosenberg is that quite often his own fans have a distinct awareness of i. how this music could rub people up the wrong way and ii. that its maker is a diamond-studded asshat.
No idea what clicked in my brain to suddenly peg this as brilliant or to start proclaiming in private that I felt that Ariel Pink was the best pop/rock songwriter of the century so far. But I do think this, and have several other thoughts beyond that, rebutting the theorisation of Ariel Pink as hauntology or the fragment of a memory of a sound heard in the past. This is deeply original music of the highest calibre.
With other APHG releases you can, to a greater extent, hear the reference points. On The Doldrums I invite you to name specific calling cards. There's a little bit of heavy-keyboard era Cure downbeatisms, there's some vague Californian 60s pop, some even say there's a Bee Gees reference on 'Among Dreams' because there's a falsetto: which Bee Gees song does it even sound like? I've heard all the Bee Gees studio records and the answer is none of them. And the Bee Gees are plenty varied and original.
John Maus, in an inspired post, once wrote of 'Strange Fires':
The tempo of the song gradually accelerates beneath the threshold of listener’s ability to notice; ninths, sevenths, and so on, fall on the downbeat over and over again as each instrumental performance is a virtuosic achievement of ineptitude. There are thematic relations between the bass line, keyboard lines, and vocal melody. The meter constantly changes– and to relatively unusual meters no less–often and as surely as it refuses to give up that it is doing this beneath our ears. The song is utterly unto itself. If ever there were a pop music that demanded interpretation and at the level of the detail in order to be appreciated it is Ariel’s. Whenever a thing would seem to be repeating itself, it is always really some unique variation. Whenever there would seem to be an idiom being enacted, it is always really only there to be antagonized to the end of the singular question involved. Nowhere in our music have technological means been taken up to such expressive ends as this, and always only subtly. The recording and production of the thing becomes a question in that the technologies supposed to be abandoned where and when “high class” production is available are not, being turned to the end of the song’s own question or problem instead.
I think queries like this exist in most, if not all, of the tracks here. Try and follow 'For Kate I Wait' along on an instrument and the 'ineptitude' is repeated and most people (including Tim Koh, later Ariel Pink bassist) find it hard to get it exactly right.
Not that great music is necessarily 'original' or unique to its maker: I just think it suggests questions of design in this music that are much more profound than in most music that is passed off as noteworthy in the rock/pop sphere.
Side A contains one of my 1-2-3 punches in musical history - 'Strange Fires', 'Among Dreams', and 'For Kate I Wait' - a towering achievement most would give a lung to match. Side B is completely rock-solid too, joyful in its expressiveness and yet keening and melancholic. This is probably the most 'genuine' music Rosenberg has ever released.
One thing I've found interesting and possibly annoying about The Doldrums and other Ariel Pink releases is the way that their tracklist has shifted over time. The first 9 tracks were the album proper, with the final 6 originally part of a released called Vital Pink that was often appended to CDs as bonus tracks. Over time they have become part of the album itself. No particularly huge problem, I guess, but they're not quite as good as everything up to 'The Ballad of Bobby Pyn'.
A forever keeper, I'd imagine. I bought it when I was completely broke because I felt I needed to own it. Now he's been cancelled you can get it for normal prices. Sigh.
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