live
There is no. point. whatsoever. in seeing him live. I walked out of the Knitting Factory about 15 minutes in (having wanted to since he started) after someone in the audience screamed "the jokes on us" or something like that, and "Ariel Pink" screamed back "exactly." Well, if he didn't care, I didn't care.
I was so excited by some of the tracks and videos from The Doldrums, but nothing of them translates into his live "performances." There's no fuzz or haze. Just him noodling on a few keyboards that seem detuned, and talking pretty tunelessly over all of it. It's not even good in a "boy this is campy!" way. It's just not good at all.
EDIT: That said, I don't really care about music qua live performance in determining whether I like it or not. I don't think the live performance is the locus of interesting or significant about music anymore (obvs. videos contribute). So I still like The Doldrums.