Dolphin changes musical course, Pink heals personal injuries

Among the musical novelties of the week, we can single out the new album by the American Pink and the single by our Dolphin, released on the eve of the release of the full-fledged album. Both Pink and Dolphin have not released new records for four years and are returning to the delight of their fans.

True, it is difficult to reproach Dolphin with laziness, because he, in general, was not greedy for new music. However, it came out as a side project called Mechanical Dog. Under this brand, two full-fledged albums were released: “Paper Combustion Temperature” (2019) and “Pink 505.85 nm” (2021). In 2021, the EP Greta was also released, in which the musician used the recording of the voice of the Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg.

All these releases can be called Dolphin’s electronic elective. According to the musician himself, he has long wanted to release music that is completely different from the one that sounds in his usual records, and the pandemic gave such an opportunity. Electro, funk and quotes from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 became a cocktail not without taste and fantasy, but Andrei Lysikov’s fan community, of course, has long wanted more. And here is the good news.

The song “Beautiful” became the opening single of the album “Farewell to Arms”, which will be released in March. In the synopsis for the song, Dolphin recalls how some time ago he bought a 1987 textbook on using a drum machine in London, and while recording “Beautiful” was inspired by one of the many patterns in the “Rock” section. When the song took shape, it was decided to continue to follow the retro style, so the video was filmed in the spirit of the era of the dawn of MTV.

The video is designed in oriental style. Someone is having dinner in a small Chinese cafe, and a rock band led by Dolphin is playing on the TV screen. “It used to be better,” the hero of the video declares, and this is perhaps the sharpest statement of all that is happening. The rest is downright beautiful. She is in a catastrophically stylish picture, and in a text about the beauty of the universe, and in a sound filled with a slight rock and roll anxiety. No clanging sounds, “torn” editing and meaningful lines.

One song can hardly be an accurate description of the entire release, however, the musician chose a very serene composition for the entry track. The previous album “The Edge” can hardly be called a battle against everything bad. Rather, the speech in that release is about humility and fatalism, but this fatalism was not without sharp gestures.

In June 2020, a video for the song “Summer” was released, which became one of the most striking video manifestos of the season. In the frame, Dolphin and Co. were dressed in a military uniform similar to German, they drank a liquid resembling blood, the video sequence used a chronicle of the funeral of politicians, including those with a reputation for tyrants. “History must be remembered. All this does not go anywhere from us, and many want to return it. We use such images to show the disgust of what is happening, ”Delfin said then in an interview with MK, probably not suspecting how accurate his forecast of three years ago would be.

The mood of the new album “Farewell to Arms”, according to the artist, is directly related to the book of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. The now-released cover features a 1955 photograph of a young couple watching the surf. If “The Edge” is somewhat fatalism, then “Farewell to Arms”, judging by the first track, may well become music for contemplating the apocalypse. It is probably more correct to watch it sitting comfortably and under a carefree soundtrack.

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Pink has been busy creating the perfect pop music for over twenty years. Depending on the fashion and the needs of the public, the singer either turns into a rock band, or has fun with a dance beat, but all this is not so much an ideology as a desire to record one hundred percent hits.

Everything that happened to Pink during the recording of the latest Trustfall album can hardly be called a good background for creating million-dollar hits. Work on new songs was going on during the pandemic, and neither Pink nor her children could avoid the disease. To all the experiences associated with the fight against an unknown virus, another drama was added. In 2021, the singer’s father died of cancer, which was another difficult test that had to endure in the midst of recording.

According to Pink herself, all these events had a considerable impact on the new songs, making them very personal and honest. The release of the album was preceded by two singles and one of them, When I Get There, became a very touching memory of the singer’s father, and the clip included amateur footage of family filming. However, in Never Gonna Not Dance Again, the sentiments gave way to a dance separation, to which an impressive part of the album is devoted.

Folk has suddenly become another pillar of the release. Pink’s recording teammates included country singer Chris Stapleton, Swedish indie folk duo First Aid Kit, and American folk group The Lumineers. Now it is customary to make albums colorful to the point of eerily, but in this case, folk and dance do not really go together. Pink still manages to write catchy melodies, but in Trustfall it is not very clear what the artist wants more: to dance, or to change the image, becoming something like a folk diva.

All this uncertainty, however, did not prevent the album from being on the first lines in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic already on the day of release. There may not be many fresh moves in Pink’s music, but these songs are still great for supermarkets, which in big show business has always been a compliment. Perhaps they will sound in our shopping malls, unless, of course, English-language tracks are banned, as required by local muzeksperty in civilian clothes.