Worn Copy (Original Release)

Album review

In 2003, Ariel Pink was an art school dropout living in L.A., working at a record store by day and recording druggy, lo-fi psychedelic pop with any free moment. He was still almost completely unknown by the time of Worn Copy, but had already issued at least a half-dozen albums of his specifically damaged songs in the form of handmade CD-Rs. As with all of his material at that point, Worn Copy masked catchy melodic sensibilities and a keen ear for hooks under obtuse waves of noise, but this chapter of Pink's output was particularly multi-colored.
The album opens with "Trepanated Earth," a sound collage that runs nearly 11 minutes and moves from a lurid synth instrumental into lengthy stretches of Pink screaming non sequiturs over spoken word passages. The song goes through moments of budget metal, twisted prog, and strung-out ranting before returning to a far more broken-sounding version of the synth theme that started it out. It's a bold starting place, with enough weirdness in the first moments of the album to alienate less adventurous listeners. From there, however, Worn Copy swings between poles of Pink's pop impulses and his experimental indulgence. On the pop side, "Immune to Emotion" captures upbeat bubble gum jangle, and the distant feel and laid-back synths of songs like "Crybaby" or "Life in L.A." act as a prototype for what would mutate into chillwave a few years later. Pink uproots any consistency or stability by throwing in Zappa-esque blurts like "Bloody (Bagonia's!)" or the meandering and sleazy "Creepshow." These different sides of Pink's personality occasionally face off in the same song. Dropping the needle at different points of the eight-minute opus "Foilly Foibles" could result in clattery synth formlessness, fluid New Order-modeled melodies, or manic harmonies. Pink was college roommates with John Maus, and the same kind of goth-informed weirdness that Maus would go on to make shows up more in moments of Worn Copy than most of the rest of Pink's sprawling catalog.
While hardly accessible by mainstream standards, the demented tug-of-war that was Worn Copy marked a turning point in Ariel Pink's trajectory. It was a CD-R of this material that wound up in the hands of Animal Collective and led to the band reissuing it and other recordings of Pink's early homemade weirdness on their Paw Tracks label. It would also be the last new music Pink released for a lengthy span, as he lost his creative spark after his half-sister was in a permanently debilitating but not fatal car accident in 2004. Pink's acclaim would continue to rise throughout the 2000s as more listeners were exposed to his unglued pop genius, but when he returned in 2010 with the comparatively clean-cut Before Today, the mania of his early days had been dialed way back for a clearer view of his songwriting. With Worn Copy, Pink's demonic side often overpowers his melodies, and the struggle between the two becomes the focal point of the album.

© Fred Thomas /TiVo