The truth about love

Reviewer's rating: 3/5

Review of the week

Don DeLillo was right: the future belongs to crowds. Pop music has been in the sway of female artists for several years now (Justin Timberlake is a distant memory and Justin Bieber is a callow boy), and increasingly they've made it into a celebratory, communal experience. Artists such as Katy Perry and Ke$ha provide the soundtrack to a social-media age, with tracks about the embrace of friends and excessive behaviour. Backed by the fervency of European club music, this is the song as tipsy Facebook update.

None of this was apparent when Pink, one of the US's leading pop stars, released her previous record, Funhouse, in 2008, but four years later she's offering more than mere nods to this new landscape, despite epitomising virtually the opposite of it. The combative 33-year-old is one of pop's great loners. On recent albums, Pink has focused on the extremes of love, whether together and delighted or alone and vengeful. There was no room for friends in those songs.

On her current single, Blow Me (One Last Kiss), Pink does her best to get into the latest groove. ''I will laugh, I'll get drunk, I'll take somebody home,'' she pledges, her powerful voice Auto-Tuned to the rough vicinity of Katy Perry. Several of these songs, including Walk of Shame, reach for an effervescence that is typified by the fizzy chorus of True Love. They tamp down Pink's defiant exuberance and make her persona part of the track instead of its imposing central figure.

That makes the album something of an each-way bet, because elsewhere Pink explores her ongoing misgivings about matters of the heart. Like Woody Allen, she's sarcastically pessimistic - if something hasn't gone wrong, it's only a matter of time. ''The truth about love is that it's blood and guts,'' she insists on the title track, and for the most part Pink dwells, sometimes excessively, on the price of happiness.

That places her well away from Rihanna, whose songs pledge allegiance to sexual pleasure, but on tracks such as Just Give Me a Reason and the closing ballad The Great Escape, Pink (who co-wrote 12 of the 13 pieces) outlines her own stance, which prizes self-determination.

Pink may suffer, but she's never the victim, and she emphasises that with the processed guitar riffs and sneering delivery of How Come You're Not Here? and Slut Like You.

Even with the gleaming production and non-stop hooks, The Truth about Love is an unsettlingly diverse album. Pink is trying to satisfy both her fans and the current pop market, and that's really no different to what U2 have been doing for rock'n'roll since 2000's All that You Can't Leave behind. Both acts believe that their branch of popular music requires a degree of substance. Neither merely wants to be a face in the crowd.

Craig Mathieson

PINK

The Truth about Love

(Sony)