Staff Reviews

Ariel Pink - Dedicated to Bobby Jameson

Review by Max Pilley

The riches are right there under the surface»

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Los Angeles’s prodigal songwriting son Ariel Pink shares his eleventh studio album, Dedicated to Bobby Jameson. The album’s title makes a direct and heartfelt reference to a real-life L.A. musician, long presumed dead, who resurfaced online in 2007 after 35 reclusive years to pen his autobiography and tragic life story in a series of blogs and YouTube tirades. Standout tracks from Dedicated to Bobby Jameson include Feels Like Heaven, a lovelorn insta-classic paying tribute to the promise of romance, Another Weekend, which encapsulates the lingering euphoria of a regrettable weekend over the edge, “Dedicated to Bobby Jameson,” a rah-rah psych romp paying homage to L.A.’s punk history, and Time to Live, an ironic anti-suicide anthem that promotes survival as a form of resistance before devolving into a grungy, Video Killed the Radio Star-style breakdown that supposes life and death as being more or less the same fate and embraces the immortal anarchy of a rock song as an alternative to the prison of reality. Alternately contained and sprawling, Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is a shimmering pop odyssey that represents more astonishing peaks and menacing valleys in the career of a man who, through sheer originality and nerve, has become an American rock and roll institution. The album marks his first full-length release with the Brooklyn-based label Mexican Summer.
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