!nk’s new album is not so much ‘try this?’ (as in ‘care to sample my new direction, guv’nor?’) as it is ‘try this!’ (like, ‘get this into yer!’, ’well, actually, right now I just have to…’ BOOF! [that’s the sound of her punching you in the nose], ‘get the fuck outta here!’). She sees your Stripped and In The Zone and Coverage and doesn’t raise you another angst-ridden Mizundastood; she flips the damn card-table over in your face and machine-guns ‘think I’ve got no aces left up my sleeve? Try this!’ into the wall. Oof!

Try This opens with “Trouble”, the first of eight tracks on the album co-helmed by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong. Pink and Armstrong cram as many ideas as possible into “Trouble”, from an Any Trouble (ha!) guitar solo to a Huey Lewis and the News-esque brass-laden breakdown, Hammond organ, layered vocals… whatwhatwhat? There’s almost too much to keep up with. It’s not the only lovingly overfed track on offer: “Catch Me While I’m Sleeping” mixes Motown girl-group sass with R&B syrup, while the fabulous “Waiting For Love” combines Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and the kitchen sink into a brilliantly overblown power-ballad.

The knockout track, though, is P!nk’s debut with Peaches, “Oh My God”. So Britney thinks she’s pretty cutting edge, with her comedy lesbian, ‘ooh matron’ whoops booiiiing “chickatah” (“chickatah”? What kind of sex talk is that, really…?) duets with Madge? Wrong! Witness P!nk & Peaches getting sexy – yes, I did just use the words ‘Peaches’ and ‘sexy’ in the same sentence – about oral sex (“problem solved, it’s dissolved with the solvent known as spit”) over a backing track that is best described as “Fly Like An Eagle” meets “Singing Winds, Crying Beasts” from Abraxas. If you didn’t realise that P!nk moaning “my little red engine says ‘I think I can, I think I can’” over this mishmash could be one of the sexiest things committed to record this year, think again. And then, there’s the brilliance of “Feel Good Time” – depending on who you believe, either stolen from or written for by Beck – ostensibly/unofficially the first single from Try This. This ‘association’ with Beck serves as something of a touchstone for the album; forget for a moment the white-male-pain and subdued arrangements of Mutations and Sea Change and remember instead the schizoid pastiche spectaculars of Midnite Vultures. What the album occasionally lacks in coherence or narrative it more than makes up for in moments of pop brilliance, the kind of eccentric pop magic that’s not been seen since the glory days of Cyndi Lauper (I’m sure it’s no accident that P!nk looks alarmingly like The Unusual One in the liner photos).

Along those lines, the areas where Try This falls down are those where P!nk eschews the eclecticism of the stronger tracks and instead produces bog-standard pop-punk or R&B tracks, presumably under pressure from Arista or LA or Linda not to frighten the kids with too much experimentalism. “Try Too Hard” and “Humble Neighbourhoods” manage to be both bland and grating, while “Walk Away” and “God Is A DJ” attempt, unsuccessfully, to recapture some of P!nk’s early-career spunk. In this sense, Try This is really only 50% of a good album, but it’s a glass-half-full scenario. If she can follow her newly found eccentricities to their [il]logical extent, she could become one of the most innovative and daring pop stars around; whether LA lets her is another matter altogether.