Ariel Pink is arguably the weirdest musician in the pop industry right now, and as such, he’s pretty much critic-proof. His latest album Pom Pom contains a five-minute ballad about being a frog and still managed to get an 8.8 from Pitchfork. But it’s not because he’s making high art. It’s because it’s plainly obvious that few people give less of a shit about making high art than he does. Say what you will about irony, pop chops, aesthetics–Ariel Pink is a comedian.
Pom Pom contains the following things: a surf song about a nude beach featuring Azealia Banks, songs called “Goth Bomb,” “Dinosaur Carebears” and “Sexual Athletics,”  a chorus of “penetration time tonight,” a skit in which a pirate introduces a teenage boy to a stripper, a ballad sung from the perspective of a stillborn baby and two dreadful collaborations with Runaways svengali Kim Fowley that could only have been made for L.A. sleaze cred. Excluding the stillborn song “Dayzed Inn Daydreams,” none of this is executed with any subtlety or semblance of that branch of humor we call “wit.”
Rather, we must take this music at face value and let the absurdity of it sink in. The change in production between his prior album Mature Themes and Pom Pom helps. Mature Themes was shrouded in burbling, bass-heavy production that gave it a thorny sense of mystery. Pom Pom has no mystery and no depth. The song about nude beaches is about nude beaches, and the song about frogs is about frogs. No obscure pop or philosophical references here.
As such, Pom Pom fails when it’s not funny. Track two to five are the sort of woozy Tinseltown miasmas Pink first honed on his breakthrough Before Today, all atmosphere with few hooks or jokes. (Five tries to be funny, but the word “penetration” has had all its humor milked out of it by now.) Six and seven are straight-faced pop songs, though not among Pink’s best by any means. As such, I start this album on track six, “Put Your Number In My Phone,” when I put it on for casual listening.
“What could tame this gypsy heart,” Pink sings on that song, bringing me to the major elephant in the room here: the nasty, often misogynistic and invariably un-P.C. statements Pink has made in the lead-up to Pom Pom‘s release. The way Pink forcefully, hatefully spits out the word “gypsy” in the song leads me to believe he just included it to piss off social-justice types. (Pink is not of Romani descent, as far as I know.)
But I don’t believe Pink is truly trying to sabotage his art in this fashion to make a statement – not in the way Eminem, his closest peer in terms of publicity tactics, has. I believe he’s just trying to sabotage his career. An artist this weird should not be operating on the scale of indie adoration and critical acclaim, if only because it might cause some to approach pom pom as a grand artistic statement. Do not make this mistake. This is comedy.  And for the most part, it’s pretty funny.