P!NK – Can’t Take Me Home – CD

The contrivance level is high on this debut by an R&B singer named for her out-of-bottle hair color. La Face Records’ latest female discovery is positioned midway between mainstream hip-hop soul and poor imitations of Kelis-style anger. Producer-writer She’kspere brings out his trademark machine beats for “There You Go,” a pale copy of “You Oughta Know”; still, that single’s more artful than “Split Personality,” which clumsily attempts to acknowledge three-dimensional human reality but really sounds like a fit of whining until Pink unleashes the inevitable melisma over the song’s coda. Elsewhere, she makes nice on standard-issue ballads (“Stop Falling”) and lite-reggae proclamations of love (“Private Show”). “I just wanna make you feel things,” Pink sings at one point. Unfortunately, the emotion the cynical Can’t Take Me Home inspires most is annoyance. –Rickey Wright