Pink’s confessions make good music
Pink’s seventh album, which debuted at No. 1 and had the best first-week sales (more than 400,000) of any album by a female artist since Beyonce’s Lemonade, takes the confessional tone she has succeeded with in recent years and makes it her focus.
But she throws in plenty of twists to keep people guessing. The biggest surprise is Eminem’s arrival on “Revenge,” which adopts a groove similar to “My Name Is” at the beginning that Pink raps and sings over, as the unlikely duo debate the merits of revenge on exes. On “I Am Here,” she goes from Lumineers alt-country to gospel hoedown in a matter of moments, creating something wild and spiritual. On the title track, she bounces between extremes to try to explain her relationship — “my perfect rock bottom, my beautiful trauma, my love, my love” — and with help from Jack Antonoff builds a catchy musical backdrop to match.
The first single, “What About Us,” best captures Pink’s mood for the album — infusing a poignant ballad with radio-friendly dance beats and adopting the lyrical stance of imperfect, but defiant, that she carries through most of the album. On “For Now,” she crafts a potent guitar ballad that is idiosyncratically hers. “Can’t we just freeze frame, pause, rewind, stop,” she sings over a spare arrangement. “And get back to the feelings we think we lost for now?” Her twist on cherishing simpler times, “Barbies,” is another treasure.
She wrote or co-wrote every song and it shows. Everything feels like Pink was talking about her life over dinner.
Over the course of an album, things may get a bit repetitive. However, her unique perspective makes the whole uplifting, painful trip worthwhile. Hot tracks: “What About Us,” “Barbies,” “I Am Here” — GLENN GAMBOA Newsday (TNS)
B Taylor Swift “Gorgeous”
Anyone hoping that Taylor Swift’s next album Reputation (out Nov. 10) will be a cold blade of revenge will be surprised by the gooey romance of her new single, “Gorgeous.”
The song is a hard turn from the angry, slightly unhinged electro-rock of her recent singles. Instead, it’s a maudlin pop ballad about falling hard for a super-hot dude despite some minor reservations.
It’s built with modern subbass and synth pings (albeit with some silly flourishes like sampled baby talk and hokey chimes). But the drippy, devotional lyrics and Swift’s delivery are weirdly indebted to the kind of teen pop heard on mid-2000s TV shows such as The Hills.
It’s not quite what we expected from the new, supposedly more cold-blooded Swift we recently heard on “Look What You Made Me Do.”
The song returns Swift to Shellback and Max Martin, the Swedish producers and writers who helped design much of her pop crossover album 1989. That record was a global smash, and while Reputation will need no help hitting the top of the charts, it does seem like it’ll be more all over the map than previously expected. — AUGUST BROWN Los Angeles Times (TNS)
B+ Musiq Soulchild Feel the Real eOne Music
The most ear-catching aspect of Musiq Soulchild’s latest is the chance to hear the Philadelphia-born artist during nearly every moment of his eighth album.
Feel the Real is long, dense and mostly fulfilling, but Musiq’s omnipresence also requires commitment to get through its two discs of more than 97 minutes at once.
Doubling down on aspects of love and romance, from the theme of friends with “Benefits” and the insistent persistence of “Sooner or Later” to the Stevie Wonder-sounding “Like the Weather” and the head-over-heels passionate abandon of the title track, Soulchild has crafted an often spectacular set.
Quality control seems to slip a bit on the second disc, despite its highlights.
There are alluring sonic details — a nearly progrock guitar at the start of “Test Drive,” big band drums launching “Sooner or Later” and a guitar-piano combination that screams Radiohead on “Hard Liquor.”
“Simple Things” contains a few elements some of the other songs could have benefited from in larger doses — an instrumental solo and about 20 seconds of strippeddown vocals which charm with their beauty and simplicity.
Hot tracks: “Simple Things,” “Like the Weather,” “Sooner or Later” — PABLO GORONDI The Associated Press
A Gregg Allman Southern Blood Rounder
“I’ve got so much left to give, but I’m runnin’ out of time,” Gregg Allman sings on “My Only True Friend,” the first song on Southern Blood. That overarching sense of mortality, met by Allman with a mix of urgency and acceptance, looms over this posthumous release, a magnificent and moving a valedictory.
“My Only True Friend” is the only song on the album written by Allman, a founding member of the Allman Brothers Band who died in May at 69. The well-chosen outside material, drawn from the rock, blues and soul that Allman so thoroughly mastered and synthesized, seems to speak to his life. Given his circumstances, Allman’s performances lend new resonance to the songs, such as Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was,” Willie Dixon’s “I Love the Life I Live,” and Lowell George’s “Willin’.”
It’s fitting that the album closes with Jackson Browne’s “Song for Adam,” with Browne guesting on vocals. Not only does the song fit thematically, but Browne was an early champion of Allman, who covered Browne’s “These Days” on his first solo album in 1973. Their pairing here brings a monumental career full circle.
Hot tracks: “Song for Adam,” “I Love the Life I Live,” “My Only True Friend” — NICK CRISTIANO The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)