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‘Before Today’ is Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti‘s first album for their new label 4AD and it looks like the partnership has struck gold at the first try. ‘Before Today’ takes all the flashes of brilliance you may have heard throughout Ariel’s 10 year plus career and condenses them into one record. Add to the record a production sheen never before heard from the L.A. cult hero and you have an (the?) album of the year.

For Fans Of: Animal Collective, Flaming Lips, Ween, Girls, MGMT.

Ariel Rosenberg has been putting out music under his ‘Ariel Pink’ and ‘Haunted Graffiti’ guises since around 1996. Famed for his D.I.Y. home recordings and the application of weird sounds to 70s and 80s pop influenced gems where the weird generally outweighed the pop. Haunted Graffiti which started as a loose idea has now become a fully fledged band featuring Tim Koh (bass), Kenny Keys (you guessed it) and Aaron Sperske (drums). The band’s influence is paramount on the focused ‘Before Today’ which is rich in instrumentation of the highest order ranging from Motown-ish grooves on ‘Can’t Hear My Eyes’ to altogether more prog feeling efforts like ‘Little Wig’.

That is of course not to play down Ariel’s part as that still remains the biggest. His rich vocals, more apparent than ever, and his custom air of weirdness (see ‘Menopause Man’) coupled with schizophrenic musical tendencies are what lift this album onto a pedestal that it will be hard for many other bands to reach.

Initial stand outs include Abbey Road mastered single ‘Round and Round’, the previously mentioned ‘Little Wig’ and the superbly named homage to the 80s ‘Beverly Kills’. That said this is undoubtedly an album that will reveal new treasures upon each spin, of which there will be many more around these ways.

Order Before Today from the following stores:
ITUNES | BEGGARS USA | AMAZON UK | AMAZON US | ROUGH TRADE | HMV