Lo-fi is great, but sometimes it can add an air of pretentiousness to modern music that makes it feel as though the band is trying a little too hard to grasp onto a type of authenticity that they were never able to manufacture organically. With Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, we get all the joys of lo-fi and none of the attitude. The same, however can not be said of other bands employing similar techniques, including one of the acts that accompanied Ariel Pink during their latest set at the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland.
Puro Instinct (formerly Pearl Harbor) was a dreamy sounding six-piece. They had all of the cool summery sound and laid back California atmosphere that one would expect with a band of trendy looking blondes, but what their music had in style, it lacked in basic execution. Their lead singer’s vocals were pretty hard to hear throughout most of their set, a problem only accentuated by the amount of reverb on her mic.
While one of their guitarists was clearly pretty good, she seemed out of synch during many of the songs, but that could just be chalked up to poor instrumental arrangement since their music still sounds out of whack in its recorded form. That was sort of the overarching theme of their time on stage. Their music came off as cluttered, messy and thoroughly yawn inducing. Not even a short appearance on one of their songs from Ariel Pink helped liven things up. In the end, they came off as a young band who probably need to spend more time working on their music and less time trying to look cool.
Magic Kids were a huge departure from Puro Instinct, radiating a genuine enthusiasm. Their music and energy was the epitome of upbeat. Where Puro Instinct’s sound was sloppy, this six-piece band -- who hailed from Memphis, Tenn. -- was clean and tight. Overall, their sound was poppy, rich and sunny. Their lead singer came off at first listen as a little off key, but improved over the course of their time on stage, channeling a nice Belle and Sebastian-esque monotony in his voice that he later mixed with a well-executed falsetto.
The band, as a whole, played like professionals and sang their hearts out. The selling point with Magic Kids though is the obvious joy they take in performing and playing music. They kept fairly quiet between sets, but the lead singer did accept a sip of beer from a girl in the audience as he knelt down at the front of the stage, singing intimately into the crowd. The rest of the band moved around in their own way, with their bassist taking the cake for most spastic dance moves of the night.
When Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti finally took the stage, the venue was packed with an eager crowd. The band functioned as a beautifully connected, singular unit, but it was Ariel Pink who really stole the show with just the right amount of swagger in his step and some creative uses of the microphone.
Jumping between older material like “For Kate I Wait” and newer stuff like “Round and Round” off of Before Today, Pink’s voice shown through stellar instrumentation with a matter-of-fact flatness, and a surprising amount of depth. Transcending the eerie lo-fi sound of their record, the band busted out a hard rock tinged set with just the right amount of psychedelic in their sound, working the crowd into a frenzy as they went. Pink himself, apart from his rock ’n’ roll bravado, was a charismatic force to be reckoned with. Clearly a little (or maybe a lot) inebriated, he was Hunter S. Thompson musically reincarnated. Complete with amber-ish aviator sunglasses, he bent and snickered his way through song after song, pausing to mumble out nonsensical phrases from time to time and crowd surfing through the venue for an entire song.
Coupling this grand personality with the rest of the band, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti really know how to fill a room with their sound. They played not one, but three encores. The room gradually thinned out a bit, but there was still a solid crowd up till the end. It might have felt like the show that wouldn’t end, with the music tapering off at around 1:15 a.m., but that was alright. This is a band that manages to suck their crowd in to a different world and make you forget what time it is. All that mattered, up to the end, was the music.
