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Let’s remem­ber this year as the year we learned to say “twenty-ten” instead of “two-thousand-ten,” because as awk­ward as this adjust­ment may have been, it is an adjust­ment that seems to have some mean­ing to it. Even though “twenty” is more in line with the “nine­teen” that pre­fixed years of the pre­vi­ous cen­tury, the pro­nounc­ing thereof seems to be lay­ing down dis­tance between those years. What’s been famil­iar is becom­ing strange, and what is strange becomes more famil­iar. Before Today, the 2010 album by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graf­fiti, cap­tures the cen­ter of this cul­tural vor­tex at its swirliest.

I’m not sure whether I’m sim­ply stat­ing the obvi­ous, or tak­ing a really wild leap on this, but I’m con­vinced that “Hot Body Rub,” the opener on Before Today, is an East­ern jazz trib­ute to James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party, the 1983 SNL sketch fea­tur­ing Eddie Mur­phy. I am sure — although I was sur­prised to dis­cover — that the sec­ond track, “Bright Lit Blue Skies,” is a cover of a 1966 song by a mostly unher­alded garage rock band called The Ris­ing Storm. And I know what I hear through­out the album, which is allu­sion to eras gone by. I hear ‘70s prog rock, ‘90s lo-fi, a gen­eral ‘80s cocaine aes­thetic, 50 years of out­sider influ­ence. This music could be called decon­struc­tion­ist, if one were inclined to apply such labels.

Most impor­tantly, maybe, Before Today is a bal­anc­ing act of the strange and the famil­iar. Strange­ness abounds, and one must observe no more than a few song titles, such as “Butt-House Blondies” and “Menopause Man,” to take note of this. Those songs, espe­cially, are jar­ring, both in title and in lyrics, but both, while not stand­outs, demon­strate enough pop famil­iar­ity to keep us lis­ten­ing. As a whole, Before Today is a pop mas­ter­piece, and “Round and Round” is as catchy as any pop song released this year.

There does seem to be a fas­ci­na­tion, if not an obses­sion, with the con­cept of time through­out the album. There are the musi­cal allu­sions I’ve already men­tioned (but couldn’t pos­si­bly pull apart and ana­lyze in detail), but there are also lyri­cal themes. Most of the lyrics seem to look either back or ahead, remem­ber­ing or dream­ing. One excep­tion might be “Bev­erly Kills,” which, instead, repeats, “can’t stop the press,” and I don’t really know what Ariel means by that, but it seems sug­ges­tive of the unstop­pa­bil­ity of move­ment through time, rather than the power of the press.

Nowhere is the theme more obvi­ous than an “Round and Round.” Ariel sings, “It’s always the same as always,” and observes that “I’m afraid, you’re afraid, and we die, and we live, and we’re born again.” Toward the mid­dle, a phone rings, and Ariel fields the call, speak­ing, “Hello? Oh, hi!” All the while, we hear the refrain, “Up and around, we go, round and around, we go, merry-go-round, we go.” Before we get to the end, Ariel makes a beau­ti­ful state­ment about the romance involved in regret: “Sen­ti­men­tal, heart­break­ing, every­thing is my fault,” before going out with the repeated line, “Hold on, I’m callin’, call me back to the ball, and we’ll daz­zle them all.” All this over dif­fer­ent sec­tions of music that dies and lives and is born again.

It’s in all that where I find what I love about Before Today. Regard­less of what “Round and Round” says about time, from the open­ing na-na-na-nas, the only time that mat­ters is that being kept by the rhythm sec­tion. It’s in that cen­ter of the vor­tex, I guess, the strange­ness and the famil­iar­ity, the past and the present, that (iron­i­cally?) brings me strictly into “this” moment. Remem­ber­ing and dream­ing are activ­i­ties of the present. Before Today sounds like twenty-ten.