Ariel Pink: "Put Your Number in My Phone"

Photo by Erez Avissar

Ariel Pink offers three basic flavors: You’ve got your pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade, you’ve got one full of fresh-pumped stomach acid, and you’ve got one where the two are swirled together. He’s written hundreds and hundreds of songs, and each one can be sorted neatly into one of these three modes. “Put Your Number in My Phone” is a first-pitcher affair: The guitars are sunlit and soft, the chord progression yawns open like a Cheshire cat smile, and Pink’s mannered vocal take is a little ode to British psych-pop.

Like all his best work, it feels like a graft of two slightly incompatible-but-similar pop songs. The lyrics are full of “babys” and blandishments that turn weird when you listen to the margins: “There’s magic in the air/ The night sky greets your face like a mystery uncovered”—was that written in a language other than English first? Just to remind you those other two pitchers are close by, Pink sneaks in a voicemail (an old tactic, dating back to his earliest releases), this time from an audibly annoyed girl who hasn’t heard from him in awhile. Hopefully not this one.

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