GIRLS FALL LIKE...

Oh my god, Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday is a mess. It fails for the exact reason (spoiler alert) Kanye's "All Of The Lights" works: super-pop overload. Unfortunately, the mock to all of us critics that she threw down on Yeezy's "Monster" when she was "all up in the bank with a funny face" is exactly the modus operandi she should've stuck to when making her debut record: more crazy, less, uh...less Alicia Keys. 

The record as a whole has a few high points, but mostly it's like "really, 50k for a verse with no album out? Oh, man, say goodbye to that shit." 

Then...and then...and then: this brilliantly confounding iTunes bonus track, "Girls Fall Like Dominos". YUP, it's a fucking BIG PINK sample. 

Nicki Minaj: Girls Fall Like Dominos 

This? This bonus track is better than the entirety of Pink Friday combined. It's fierce, witty and relentless, and Nicki is stealing Drake's girls, Wayne's girls, signing breasts and throwing the fuck down like she'd never written "Dear Old Nicki".  THERE IS SO MUCH BRILLIANCE HERE IT HURTS ME...and it makes what's actually grouped as Pink Friday so much more tragic. 

Like Dominos: The Big Pink @ The Bowery Ballroom, NYC 12/3/2009

The Big Pink

Bowery Ballroom NYC

12/3/2009

Here's the problem for The Big Pink: they know a couple of songs, and they know them well. And they have an album, A Brief History Of Love, that's pretty fucking good. Then they go and sell out two nights in New York and suddenly have to reproduce the giant bombast of the album live, while maintaining the frosty intimacy.

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All Soft And Free

When news of The Big Pink-a band supposedly combining the best of 4AD London roughneck sounds (wind tunnel guitar explosions, raw edges and morose sneer) with Factory (love, love, synths, love)-first reached my ears, I immediately hunted down their debut album A Brief History Of Love, fittingly enough released on 4AD. What I found was an addicting, lush but deceptively upfront collection of songs about sex and heartbreak and...well, what else is there, really?

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