From the time he began releasing music in the late '90s until 2004, lo-fi L.A. songwriter
Ariel Pink prolifically wrote and recorded volumes of hazy sounding, structurally fractured pop music under the moniker
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti. These unhinged sounds from his unknown days would develop as his cult status grew into indie success with albums starting in the 2010s, but in his earliest phases,
Pink was simply throwing any and every idea at the wall and releasing what stuck as homemade CD-R albums. Of his extensive output in this time, nowhere was he quite as in tune with his west coast pop side as on fifth album
House Arrest. The album begins with "Hardcore Pops Are Fun," a direct homage to simpleminded pop music that mangles
Beach Boys harmonies and bubblegum melodies with the signature muffled production
Pink had been perfecting at the time. "Interesting Results" also approaches jangle pop, but gets cut off at the pass by manically shifting song structures, key changes, and blasts of unexpected percussion. Much of
House Arrest moves in this nonlinear fashion, jumping from idea to idea within the same song. The goofy and hamfisted "Gettin' High in the Morning" uses its almost-seven-minute running time skittering between faux-metal riffing,
XTC-styled vocal hooks, and
Zappa-esque technical intricacy. By this point,
Pink had developed a correspondence with established outsider songwriter
R. Stevie Moore, and the influence of
Moore's irreverent surrealism is all over
House Arrest. Would-be dramatic pop songs like "Every Night I Die at Miyagis" and "The People I'm Not" are stopped from taking themselves too seriously at every turn,
Pink disrupting their flow with obscene interjections or weird, out-of-place breakdowns. As with all of his early work,
Pink's melodic gifts are at odds with his eccentricities throughout the album. Where other albums from this era were swallowed in existential bleakness or gave into cartoonish indulgences, pop gets the upper hand on
House Arrest. While it's still far from accessible, it's the album from his early days where
Pink buries his songs in strangeness to a lesser degree, letting more of himself come through in the songs. When he allowed his own weird breed of Pacific Ocean pop to come to the surface as it did on
House Arrest,
Pink indeed achieved some of his most interesting results. ~ Fred Thomas