Album review: Pink enlists the help of First Aid Kit and Max Martin
Pink just released her ninth album, Trustfall. (Photo by LISA O'CONNOR / AFP)
Pink.
Trustfall
★★★☆☆
Pink’s ninth album tries to be two very different things at once. In the first instance, it’s her lockdown record. The singer and her son both became seriously ill with the virus. She was also coming to terms with the death of her father – another theme that surfaces throughout Trustfall.
Yet at the same time, this is a big brash pop affair, with production from notable party starters such as Max Martin and Fred Again.
There’s a big gulf between a wake and a party and Trustfall sometimes struggles to bridge that divide.
It opens with When I Get There, a ballad about meeting her dad for a drink in heaven. The tune is a co-write with Amy Wadge, best known for helping pen Ed Sheeran's Thinking Out Loud and has a Sheeran-esque flair for weepy melodrama.
Grief gives way to turbo-charged power balladry on the title track. “Picture the place where it doesn’t hurt,” sings Pink, unpacking the lockdown angst she suffered through during her bout of Covid.
It’s a brooding bopper, with Pink pushing her husky vocals to breaking point as house honcho Fred Again layers in bright, bouncy grooves.
Pink’s popularity nowadays is largely owed to her spectacular live shows (though she is skipping Ireland this summer). And so she could easily have delivered a new record that relived old glories.
Yet to her credit, she has tried something new here, as proved by the Wagnerian twang of Long Way To Go – a collaboration country trio The Lumineers.
Best of all is Kids In Love, a get-together with Stockholm folk duo First Aid Kit. It’s a world away from the apocalyptic thump of the trite single Never Gonna Not Dance Again (“I’m never gonna throw away my dancing shoes”).
Pink fans may be alarmed to find her sharing the floor with two melancholic Swedes. But on a record that repeats its fair share of major league pop cliches, it’s a thrill to find Pink trying something else on for size.
