SCARED FAMOUS by ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI

Ariel Pink's in-between songs have been the most mind-blowing pop discovery of my adulthood. 2004's compilation of late 1990's recordings, The Doldrums, sits in whatever personal top ten I care to compose, immune to any whim I may trip over. His is a neon shimmer; Home recorded epics which don't dispense with glitter, melodies which break the technology's defence, playing expansively, hilariously, rudely. As puppy-dog sad, sweet, and familiar as Abba. As weird as them too, splitting the prototypical nexus of harmony into twisted catches of one hundred simultaneous choruses.

Look for Ariel Pink on Youtube and among the splinters you'll find a home-made video to one of his tunes. It is a simple shot of a TV screen, filmed crudely with a video camera as a sequence from The Simpsons plays in the dark. It is impossible to tell if he did it himself or if it is the work of a fan. It seems incredibly apt. Pink's records capture a brittle pop nostalgia; like found Wonder Years episodes on VHS, intercut with half of Repo Man and the end of Benny and Joon, not enough to keep, but you do; like European cartoons (dubbed by one eager voice, girl parts and all) seen while suffering an early romantic illness, a six week relapse with glandular fever aged nine; fretful odd daytime shows never seen again, ghostly animations partly slept through; The Monkees repeats at half-term. Pink's game show buzz is essentially a summary of low pop culture, it's architecture and accoutrements. It sounds like the best bits of other songs, a collection of jingles, like The Residents' Commercial Album tunes played over each other at double speed, or if the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were commissioned in 1974 to make 30 second synth wig-outs for every last US radio and television show, and imports too. It is the history of rock reduced: It is Squeeze squeezed, a cheaper Cheap Trick, a crashed Cars, and so on and so on, rehashes of Denver, John, and Denver, The Last Dinosaur's theme, echoing mantras from Hanna Barbera relics, all shot through with the naive self-belief of a ten-year old playing dress-up, any attic attire, an awkwardly hopeful glam.

Nostalgia is a loaded word. Pink goes beyond. He is (or his records are) open to retro-psychic possibility- Imagine! If you could rewind telly all the way back! Imagine, if telly ran an 'on this day' channel, and just showed Aug 25, 1984, for example, or December 1st, 1972, and just showed everything, adverts, inserts, news, etc, whatever they showed, slow periods, boring bits and all, even the cartoons when they were ahead of schedule. No edited high/lowlights, no contextualising, no modern commentary, no haircut judgements. The seismic shift of witnessing whole slabs of boring, wondrous culture, the million nuances forgotten, would reduce all to tears.

And so Pink goes about his business, not separating what needs to be kept from what doesn't, throwing it all together over (one imagines) thousands of tapes, an endless record. He disinters from the ancient pop texts, trash and all, salvaging drowned tunes from choppy forgotten waters, resuscitating fey homilies and spangled spazz-outs plucked from golden wrecks.

Scared Famous evokes being drugged at a fair on a wet bank holiday, a violent puppet show in a seaside town, staticky reports from aged speakers, and sticky arrests; the glowing suggestion of an uncle's fish tank, tetras sparkling, gouramis kissing, eyes open in gormless wonder. A beer garden with carved kiddy shapes. Suggestible shadows evoking benign demons. Saturday afternoons idling at the abandoned bandstand, vandalising casually, knowing that sunset will come and all this will end.

Gopacapulco starts like a Chiquitos house band turning the hook of Starman below the border, into a twitchy hokum Latino swing, before a stately chorus is unfurled. Howling At The Moon is a synth-fuelled Lou Reed impersonation, bittersweet and hilarious, Are You Gonna Look After My Boys? is the Miami Sound Machine running in the woods on heart power, sweet and catchy as a sexual injury. Beefbud is Barrett, Jesus Christ Came To Me In A Dream is the true, desperate meaning of Christmas past present and future, touching, absurd, stuffed full. Baby Comes Around is a triumphant riff interrupted by half-a-dozen Joe Meek choruses, Politely Declined and Why Can't I Be Me? are manga laments, wistful comic Frankensteins sobbing in caves. Girl In A Tree is Hall & Oates undead and undone, losing a three-legged race, Kitchen Club is a ghostly off-key cut of dub (all Ariel Pink records are dub, in some way) reggae that seems to enigmatically start some kind of (anti) sexist argument, but is all the better for only suggesting this. It may be about food. It's certainly about girls. The List (My Favorite Song) is another (likeHouse Arrest's Interesting Results) of Pink's self-querying lyrics, a lovely ham-fisted attempt to understand the meaning of song writing, the meaning of meaning.

Ultimately, it's always a romance.

Pink sends carefully crafted letters to idols and is crushed when they don't answer. He practices magic, and next to him, your love seems adult and pedestrian. You could vivify trite scripts with his Sirkian water. He's the kid who imagines himself in a relationship with Judy Garland or Lindsey Lohan or the girl next door, just good friends, hoping for more. He believes he can save them. He holds candles tightly, and writes crestfallen ouija rites and crushed odes, commuting with imaginary dead sisters. He writes false back stories for non-existent banged-up Dads, and draws on his hands in electric black. His is a dictionary that requires of him the dedication of Dr Johnson, and includes made up words from far-flung languages, gibberish to the naked eye, but displaying enough grammatical structure and craft to suggest a complex and gorgeous plan. He is a blue-eyed avatar, standing at the LA Hells mouth of pop memory, taking as much in as he can.

The fire crackles. So does the radio.