Pom Pom is purportedly the first Ariel Pink record credited to “only” Ariel himself without the Haunted Graffiti, but anyone in the know knows he’s been working with nothing more than a few cheap guitars, a melted four-track, and his dirty mouth for centuries. Factually, it is the first album gone solo since the tangible Haunted Graffitti came into existence and the first Ariel Pink album in a post-HG world with Pink at every knob. But, of course, there’s Worn Copy and The Doldrums out there as proof that there was Ariel genius long before there was Mature Themes.

To make the analogy that this is Pink’s fist time presenting himself as, let’s say, Prince, is a bold statement. Pom Pom is the album Ariel Pink always wanted to make in the days of House Arrest, but now has infinite resources to make every imagined string section a clear and present reality. Pom Pom flirts liberally with Ariel Pink’s radio dial. Within the first four songs he goes from the air-conditioned dream-woven ’70s soft-rock of “Lipstick” to the hyper-melted prog of “White Freckles” and onto the end of that decade’s penchant for more rebellious, darker tones with the show-stopping “Four Shadows.” Pink is a chameleon in the sense that he can make “Nude Beach A Go-Go” a super-obvious Beach Boys vamp and not simply a novelty. Pom Pom could in a higher conscious be the best record Ween never made. Calling it a pastiche or genre-shifting homage, though, would ruin the mood and diminish the ambition shown by Pink here. There are thousands of ideas packed into a tight space. It’s an idiosyncratic melange of pop equal in scope to something like Sgt. Pepper or a record by Zappa’s Mothers. But nowhere does the nonsense that surfaces at times—from the goofy ode to “Jell-O” or the even more mad-capped epic of “Exile on Frog St.”—deter from the inventiveness of the songwriting; every piece fits. In fact, the burbling funk of strip-club anthem “Black Ballerina” and the pure amphetamine power-rock of “Negative Ed,” serve to bolster Pom Pom’s best moments. When Pink portrays the role of folk-singer basking in a fading and sepia-toned California sun, as he does on lead single “Put Your Number on My Phone” and the show-stopping finale “Dayzed Inn Daydreams,” the kooky side of his persona is elevated and understood.

It makes sense that both R. Stevie Moore and Kim Fowley lend a inspirational hand in the design of Pom Pom. It’s a record that is truly “choose your own adventure” with seemingly infinite rabbit holes. It’s encyclopedic in nature, but somewhat mystical in how it came to be. Again, love him or hate him, the comparison to Prince is not so far-fetched. In his own mind, he’s already conquered a universe of sound and how he arranges it all for the public is a sight to behold.