Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 03/04/06
Label: SonyBMG

The most significant difference between British and US pop stars is that the Americans are somehow quite capable of convincing the music-buying public that they are original, credible, self-made entities and not puppets. We accept they came up with whatever look they might currently be touting, that they exert an enormous creative influence over the contents of any new release and that they call the shots over their career as a whole. Pink is particularly good at this, having persuaded people that she is the first woman in popular music - if not the world - to dye her hair an unnatural shade, have both piercings and tattoos and flaunt a bad attitude as a USP (while fulfilling all contractual obligations).

Now, even if you chose to go along with this, for 'at least she's not just another bland stage-school brat, I suppose' purposes, the music tells another story. Attempts to write with Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong on last album "Try This" proved unpopular (if not entirely unsuccessful; "Trouble" was terrific) so this time, Pink shares her songwriters with all the other so-called iconoclasts of pop: Christina Aguilera, Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani (all Linda Perry), Britney Spears (Max Martin) and Avril Lavigne (Butch Walker).

However, rather than pure pop, the bulk of the tracks are Diane Warren-lite soft rock ballads of the kind that became Aerosmith's '90s stock-in-trade, whether backed by session players or the Indigo Girls (as on the self-explanatory, teen poetry cringefest of "Dear Mr President"). The exceptions are the dancehall rant of "Stupid Girls", the bubblegum strop of "Leave Me Alone (I'm Lonely)", the stripped blues of "The One That Got Away" - which makes an unplugged album seem like a great idea - and the lunatic bass-heavy electro ode to onanism of "Fingers", none of which is wholly brilliant but all of which are at least surprising and a whole lot more in keeping with her character.

Because what Pink does have, which edges her ahead of her contemporaries, is a fantastic rock voice, underused on just about every track here. It's no surprise that "Wayne's World" director Penelope Spheeris wanted her in the lead of a Janis Joplin biopic - she's got that broken, raw tone to her voice when she pushes it (which she rarely needs to) that says more of her well-documented unhappy upbringing and emotional baggage than 20 pages of self-pitying lyrics (for which, hear the "Beautiful"-esque "Nobody Knows").

Next time, she needs to dump the tired wild-girl shtick, unleash her lung-power and the world will fall at her feet. For now, this is just another album of production-line US pop.

    by Emma Morgan