Pitchfork
66
Ariel Pink is a misogynist; he’s not funny; he’s the worst thing ever; Ariel stinks. Paint him as provocateur and raging narcissist, but as the past few years have proven, he’s also a team player, down for boosting his friends and game for collaborations of all stripes. And so tapping him for the second installment of Mexican Summer’s Myths series seems like a no-brainer, especially since he’s worked with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering previously, her voice gracing “Early Birds of Babylon” on his 2012 album Mature Themes.
With the breakout success of last year’s Front Row Seat to Earth, Weyes Blood’s profile ticked up considerably, and while four songs clocking in at 14 minutes is slight by design, Ariel is wise to accentuate Mering’s voice. Only on opener “Tears on Fire” does Pink take the lead. It begins with guitar jangle and what is either a warbling synthesizer or else Mering doing her best Yma Sumac impersonation in the background. For the first 40 seconds, it’s the gentlest I’ve ever heard Ariel—only for an operatic metal stomp, like a gate of hell, to rip open immediately after at the chorus. The song jags between pomposity and modesty, with Pink lurching between lines about “roasting pigs on the pyre” and how “the joke was from the heart.”
Then Mering takes over on “Daddy, Please Give a Little Time to Me” against a queasy synth gurgle and a snare that cracks from a room over, all of it swaddled in a haze of reverb and echo. It’s a peculiar song, as weirdly stilted and stylized as that of Pink, as Mering moves from a high quaver to delivering her lines like lost a Shangri-Las soliloquy.
In tandem, they do a hazy approximation of the early-’80s L.A. Paisley Underground on “On Another Day,” as if some demo from 1983 suddenly bobbed to the surface. It’s a slow burn of a duet between the two, at times evoking X’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka. Even though the end of the song reveals it’s played live in front of a crowd, there remains that tactile sense of distance that Pink’s sonics readily tap into, as if echoing not just from the past but from a parallel dimension.
But the clear standout of this brief collab is “Morning After.” Another strange folk-synth hybrid, Mering’s voice sounds like Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny doodling around on a Moog; she stuns while barely climbing above a purr. “Here it comes/A cure for the night I’ve been waiting/To let you inside,” Mering sings of a long-anticipated love. But as the sinewaves quiver in the background, the moonlight-tinted love song turns into a vampire tale: “When I saw you I knew I was cursed/I’m the one who got bit first.” Short-lived as Myths may be, one hopes that Pink and Mering—odd, kindred spirits—have the chance to commune again.
Fri Jan 27 06:00:00 GMT 2017