Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti has begun. A new pink dawn is caressing the earth's body as you read this professionally written bio. Legions of imitators of that well revered Haunted Graffiti sound will now have to go on back to their respective drawing boards. Ariel has written the book, and now he's lighting it on fire and with that fire he has cooked up a new record. It tastes perfect. It's as if the band had been dining in the fanciest of restaurants and they got food poisoning and wrote the songs that will eventually be on this new album that you will soon be listening to whenever you get it.
It's as if the food at said restaurant tasted splendid but there may have been spores. It's like vomit on fine italian marble. A jet-shot of beautiful glowing puke on something recently mopped and shined. Don't worry, they'll clean it up. They'll clean it up using your ears as vacuums.
That swill slurging around in your brain will take hold. Like John Carpenter's "The Thing" played in reverse, you will be cleansed. It will sate the thirst in your soul for something violent and pure. Ecstasy within divine perversion. "You got 'The Haunt'?", folks will ask when they see your pin needle eye holes. They'll know.
Ariel knows too, and he has climbed out of the gauze and fog of his musical past but so also has Haunted Graffiti. They are no longer in the white coffin of serpents and mazes. The entire band are a fresh new zombie now, and they love themselves. They touch themselves with their music. They pick at their sores with their music. Oh, and those thrillingly confounding musical mazes of the past are still there too, don't worry, but now they stand in that finest of Italian marble, tall and polished and proud, ready for defiling.
Ariel's band, meanwhile, has congealed into something fierce. An extension (or crustacean?) of Ariel's brain that has unhinged and become even more dangerous. In other words, these musicians are superb. Tim Koh, Kenny Keys, Aaron Sperske, and Cole MGN are all talented young men hell bent on creating a fantastically complex musical bed of roses and nails for Ariel to lay upon and dream his special dreams. They will tell you about some of those very dreams in this collection of songs before you.
And again I say that Ariel has stepped out of the fuzz blanket. I mean that. While you listen, sometimes you'll swear that Ariel is in the room with you. And when that mighty chorus rains down, a hundred Ariel's jump out of every corner and drawer to comfort and intimidate you. That voice, oh that voice, with an ear for melodies so intrinsic to our internal nerveture and that cannot be merely switched off when the record is over; that voice that dares to soar with falcons over the steel night, it is now clear as an unmuddied lake, ready to be consumed and drank in by the millions of damaged children of earth.
Now is when we need Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti the most. While our planet is being ravaged to no seeming end, the folks at 4AD have made a brilliant choice by bringing Arial Pink's Haunted Graffiti into their fine roster. A wise move, as this is the beginning of a new Haunted Graffiti, with new and unheard of musical powers. I can hear a fresh can of pink Krylon shaking right now, gearing up for the marble walls of your mind.
- Eddie Ruscha, Psychomusicologist
