In notes while listening for this article, I compared 1998’s Thrash & Burn to the Silver Jews’ Arizona Record, Pavement’s Westing (By Musket And Sextant), and Beck’s Stereopathetic Soulmanure — stripped down, amniotic marginalia that barely hinted at what those artists would later be capable of. Now I’m not sure if that’s fully accurate. Those albums I mentioned before? They’re dry runs. Thrash & Burn is a pre-dry run — the loose, tentative stretches you do before you really stretch and before you really exercise. It is two CDs – two whole CDs — of Rosenberg dipping the skin on his big toe into the songwriting pool. So, sketches: guitar noodling, keyboard drift, tossed-off vocals, self-conscious babbling, field recordings, long stretches of noise. The secret to enjoying this is to remove it from the context of what Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti traditionally represent; reimagine it as “Ariel Pink ambient,” spin it on a boom box one room over, then focus on something else.