Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today / Releases / Releases ...
By Nick Neyland
There are many styles covered on this, the first album by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti since signing to 4AD, but that glassy Fleetwood Mac production, which flourished on Rumours, gloriously saturated their sound on Tusk, and continued ...
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There’s a passage in Bill Drummond’s The 17 where he recalls traveling to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s, ostensibly to oversee the work of a hair metal band in his capacity as an A&R man for WEA. While trying to find the group in a labyrinthian studio complex, Drummond stumbled across a bloated Stevie Nicks, who was dancing eyes-closed to one of her own songs, lost to herself and the world. There are many styles covered on this, the first album by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti since signing to 4AD, but that glassy Fleetwood Mac production, which flourished on Rumours, gloriously saturated their sound on Tusk, and continued to be an obsession for Lindsey Buckingham on later hits such as ‘Big Love’, is glazed all over Before Today.
Drummond’s tale of Nicks bleaching out the world with her music in an anonymous Los Angeles studio isn’t just appropriate because of the obvious similarities in feel that Pink strives for on this album. Firstly, there’s the drugs. Nicks famously battled with cocaine in the mid Eighties, and while Pink has explicitly stated his fondness for softer drugs in the past (primarily weed, on ‘Gettin’ High in the Morning’) it’s not hard to imagine this album being made in a blizzard of white powder. That’s not to say it necessarily was constructed that way, but Pink is certainly mainlining Fleetwood Mac’s slanted coke-addled take on their soft rock sound from Tusk, which involved ripening songs with a fresh FM radio sheen and then testing their audience’s empathy via odd about-turns, unsettling moods, and a general feeling that Los Angeles had swallowed them whole and spat them out in the most unpleasant and self-destructive way imaginable.