Sentimental Heartbreaking

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Round and Round”

I’m constantly writing about songs about anxiety. I’m not actually a very nervous person! I know people who deal with some serious problems, full-on anxiety attacks. Luckily, I’m not one of them. I’m mostly just responding to the good music that comes my way, and a lot of it deals with these emotions for reasons that are fairly obvious and perhaps a little mysterious too. “Round and Round,” a fairly polished song from the typically lo-fi Ariel Pink, cycles through a series of grooves and is essentially a meditation on living with anxiety. It never sounds especially tortured, though. If anything, it seems medicated — mellow, spaced-out, dimly aware of its own dread but trying to “hold on” and keep it together. There’s more beauty in this song than ugliness, and more pleasure than pain. Nevertheless, there’s a resignation to it, this feeling of “Oh, this is how my life is, so I have to just learn how to deal with it.” It’s a mixed-up mess of barely-defined emotions, but it’s very potent and evocative.

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