'pom pom' Intermittently Successful

It’s difficult to determine just what Ariel Pink’s new album “pom pom” is supposed to be. It’s only his third album with a major label, though he started self-producing material in the ’90s. In some ways, Pink has cleaned up his sound since departing from the lo-fi production that he had adopted out of necessity in the first part of his career. And yet, “clean” would be far from accurate as a descriptor of his music. “pom pom” is a mess of a record—it is heavily nostalgic, and yet it seems to have merely a tentative relationship with its source material. It’s pop music making fun of pop music. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the record entirely as a self-indulgent inside joke. There are stretches of “pom pom” that are honest and quite beautiful. But Pink layers on so much irony that it is hard to know what to take seriously.

The album opens with fun house jingle “Plastic Raincoats in the Pig Parade.” Like much of “pom pom,” the lyrics do not make a whole lot of sense, and the production sounds confused. The song shifts without warning between dream and nightmare. Clean, catchy bridges are demolished by bouts of discordant noise. Despite this chaos, the song almost works; harmony emerges from the disparate elements. But as if Pink is trying to be sure the song is unlistenable, the track devolves into pure noise and cacophony for its last 45 seconds.

It’s a trick he pulls often on “pom pom”—a potentially enjoyable track is thrown away, and the remainder of its runtime is filled with unintelligible garbage. It is clear that Pink has the ability to write a compelling pop song: “Put Your Number in My Phone” is a wispy hipster seduction reminiscent of Paul McCartney. But Pink is much more interested in making statements than creating catchy songs.

Sometimes Pink’s social commentary is successful. On “Sexual Athletics,” Pink parodies the sex-obsession of modern pop culture. “I'm a sexual athlete / 
I'm sweet /
 Eat raw meat /
 Don't admit to defeat /
 Some say it's bittersweet,” Pink states with a distorted deadpan delivery. Here, Pink is both funny and catchy. He is making a joke that listeners can understand, and the delivery is fun. Toward the end of the song, a chorus emerges and sings Pink’s lyrics in a gospel-esque chant. The song is campy, over-the-top, and ridiculous. But as opposed to much of the album, its irony is fun—and not just for the songwriter.

Some of Pink’s explorations into sexual themes are less successful. “Nude Beach a G-Go,” a peppy surf-rock number, might be cute if the artist were a 12-year-old boy. “Black Ballerina” is even more concerning. What would have been a funky tribute to some of the goofiest pop from the ’80s gets a bit too weird at the halfway point when the song breaks into a dialogue between a grandfather and a young boy. The grandfather forces the obviously uncomfortable boy to go to a strip club, and the ensuing scene leaves a sour taste in the listener’s mouth that can’t be washed out by a catchy hook. If it is another one of Pink’s jokes, it falls flat.

And yet, in the final stretch of the two-sided album, Pink almost redeems himself. In “Picture Me Gone,” a parent meditates on death while looking into the lens of an iPhone camera during a selfie. Pink sings in a gentle croon, and the track is surprisingly poignant. The final track, “Dayzed Inn Daydreams,” is the catchiest on the album, and it makes sense that an album so removed from reality would end on a song about dreaming. “I used to dream / dream away / hide in the dark / fade into grey,” Pink repeats, backed by a chorus. Its nostalgia for bygone pop is strong enough to suggest that pop music, for Pink, isn’t just a platform for in-jokes and self-indulgence. He cares about this stuff, but either out of insecurity, boredom, or laziness, he chooses to steep his music in tired irony instead of putting out a record he believes in.