P!nk – Beautiful Trauma review
By Classic Pop | January 29, 2018
You can’t please all the people all the time, but P!nk’s seventh gives it her best shot. This, naturally, includes roping in Eminem – again – for a strangely jovial, sometimes filthy-mouthed tale of cheating on Revenge, and the song’s patchwork nature is indicative of the album as a whole.
“Beautiful Trauma feels like it’s the contrived result of market research, with little more than P!nk’s hurricane force voice as its unifying quality.” – Wyndham Wallace
If you want to raise the roof, try the anthemic title track, the galumphing Where We Go, or maybe What About Us?, which sidesteps potential accusations of self-pity by leaving its meaning vague enough to encapsulate any unsatisfying situation.
Barbies gratifies the need for a big budget power ballad, Secrets provides the token EDM excursion, Better Life offers slinky but hardly memorable R&B, and there’s even a busy gospel number, I Am Here, to secure the Christian vote. She concludes with two vocal showcases, Wild Hearts, contributing the obligatory ‘girl power’ moment – “There’s not enough tape to shut this mouth” – and You Get My Love the ‘damn, the girl can sing!’ one.
Unfortunately, it’s all as credible as her claim on But We Lost It that “the bone breaks/ It grows back stronger”. Any doctor will tell you that’s fake news, traumatic or not.