In the coming months, “pom pom,”’s latest LP of satire-laced goof-pop, will serve as an unwitting litmus test. It will play at a party, and the room will part like boys and girls at a middle school dance: some ready to dance and sing feverishly with the de facto DJ to its songs about Jello, frog princes and “goth bombs,” while the rest beg them to turn it off. You’ll see the same thing shake out in the comment sections of year-end top ten lists, complete with ad hominem attacks on Pink that, letap be honest, he’s more than in the preceding weeks.
Neither side is wrong. “pom pom”‘s 67 minutes can feel bloated; it owes a major debt to obvious influences like Frank Zappa and the skit-driven comedy LP’s of ; itap almost condescendingly flip. But Pink’s latest is also oddly refreshing, like a swig of sickly pink Pepto Bismal on an upset stomach. Like any of Zappa’s records in his heyday, itap an intimate experience with one of modern music’s strangest songwriters, a circus ride that only Pink knows how to operate.
The easiest way into “pom pom” is its handful of pop songs. Their tunes shift on a dime throughout the album, from spooky Ramones punk (“White Freckles,” “Four Shadows”) one second to cotton-mouthed sun-soaked ditties the next (). The plot changes just as quickly. “Not Enough Violence” is doom and gloom, and “Nude Beach A G-Go” is as goofy as it sounds. No matter the mood, all of the songs sound like they’ve been filtered through an ‘80s AM radio, which wedges an ironic distance between Pink and whatever the topic du minute may be. Nothing here is to be taken seriously, it suggests, save for bits of a father’s lament of his death addressed to his son—though even it is laced with satirical modern references (“I left my body somewhere down in Mexico / give Find My iPhone half a try”).
There’s a melody to each of Pink’s bizarre concepts, but “pom pom” is better described as musical rather than simply music. Many of these “songs” are more like jingles, with instrumental movements written to accompany Pink’s half-baked lyrical fantasies. While “Jell-o” passes as a strange assessment of consumer culture, itap grating, and not half as clever as it thinks. “Negativ Ed” and “Sexual Athletics” are equally off-mark, stretching dumb one-liners into painful minutes-long diatribes.
These bits make up about a third of the album, and comprise the 20-odd minutes detractors will say should have been left on “pom pom”’s cutting floor (if there was one). As insufferable as they can be, they are the chewed up bubble gum connective tissue for this glorious monstrosity, like the commercial skits on Pink’s extraterrestrial radio show. If you’ve never a note of Pink, start with “pom pom,” and check your expectations at track one. Like the man himself, itap obtuse, campy, embarrassing, and as divisive as a fart joke in a crowded elevator. But even that can be a welcome breath of fresh air sometimes.
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Dylan Owens is Reverb’s all-purpose news blogger and album reviewer. You can read more from him on , or the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
