With the seventh studio album, P!nk’s career and creativity seem to enter into a stable level. The musical direction of P!nk’s new Beautiful Trauma is pretty much same with her last 3 albums. The mixture of funhouse uptempo songs, dark mellow (sometimes dramatic) songs, and acoustic songs is same. Even if this album is mixed with songs from her other albums, there wouldn’t be any incompatibility. P!nk’s powerful vocal, suburban bad girl type lyrics with occasional four-letter words, production style, they’re all same. Her pick of Eminem was also inherited from the last The Truth About Love album. A good perspective is the new album meets the expectations from her fans, bad perspective is less challenge. Either way, high quality covers overall. That’s unchanged strong point of P!nk’s albums.
But wait a minute, Beautiful Trauma is lack of something. This album doesn’t have speedy and heavy songs. P!nk always got good hard rock style songs. Examples are “Are We All We Are” and “How Come You’re Not Here” from The Truth About Love, “Sober”, “It’s All Your Fault” (my fave) and “Ave Mary A” from Funhouse, and “Who Knew” from I’m Not Dead. It’s true that Beautiful Trauma is more focused without the aggressive songs and has no space for that type so it’s good this time. But also while listening to the new album, I miss those stormy songs because P!nk’s high power voice is so perfect with energetic rock songs. It’s an honest fact that my finger sometimes shifted to play button on The Truth About Love while listening to the new album. Perfectionist P!nk didn’t contain bad songs this time again, but Beautiful Trauma sometimes makes me miss a powerful energy like the first two songs of The Truth About Love. Especially the last two dark songs of Beautiful Trauma could give me light manic depression though they aren’t bad at all (“Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” is beautiful). The location of those songs shouldn’t be there.
By the way, P!nk has made a good selection for the first two songs of each album since Try This, and Beautiful Trauma is no difference. Especially, placing “Revenge” on the second is the best. Eminem’s vocal performance is shining there. Using a variety of voice is entertaining and makes a good accent on the album.
OVERALL POINTS: 84/100
- Songs: ★★★★
- Originality: ★★★★★
- Thrills: ★★★
- Song orders: ★★★
- Vocal: ★★★★+3/4
- Background: ★★★★+1/2
- Production: ★★★★★
- Strong songs: “Beautiful Trauma”, “Revenge”, “What About Us”, “For Now”
EXTRA (NOT COUNTED TOWARD THE OVERALL POINTS)
- Title: B+
- Album cover: D
P!NK, BEAUTIFUL TRAUMA
