Pink is an album by Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese band Boris

Boris (band)

is a Japanese experimental rock band, known for often combining and switching between different music genres including drone metal, sludge metal, noise rock, psychedelic rock, ambient and pop...

, released in 2005 on Diwphalanx Records

Diwphalanx Records

Diwphalanx Records is a Japanese punk/metal record label. It releases primarily Japanese bands.-Artist list:*Antiseen*Balzac*Banana Shakes*Bitter Sweet Generation*Blue Beat Players*Boris*Church of Misery*Central*Cool Wise Men*Dead Pan Speakers...

 in Japan and subsequently reissued in the US on Southern Lord

Southern Lord Records

Southern Lord is an American record label that was founded in 1998 by Greg Anderson, specializing in what could broadly be classified as experimental heavy metal, particularly the doom metal, stoner rock, and drone metal sub-genres. Some of the more notable artists on the label include Earth, Om,...

. The album received very favourable reviews, largely for taking a more melodic and accessible direction than the band's previous work.

A music video was also shot for the title track, but was limited to less than 100 copies on DVD. It was later included in the limited CD+DVD Southern Lord version of the album 'Smile'.

The opening guitar of "Farewell" may be a tribute to Nick Drake

Nick Drake

Nicholas Rodney "Nick" Drake was an English singer-songwriter and musician. Though he is best known for his sombre guitar based songs, Drake was also proficient at piano, clarinet and saxophone...

, as it sounds much like the instrumental track "Horn" from his 1972 album Pink Moon

Pink Moon

Pink Moon is the third and final album by English musician Nick Drake. It was recorded at midnight in two separate two-hour sessions, over two days in October 1971, featuring only Nick Drake's vocals and guitar, as well as some piano later overdubbed by Drake on the title track.-Album...

.

The full-length version of "Farewell" from the vinyl edition also appears on Variations, although the beginning fades in slightly.

Reception

Initial critical response to Pink was positive. At Metacritic

Metacritic

Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

, which assigns a normalized

Standard score

In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...

 rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has received an average

Weighted mean

The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...

 score of 80, based on 13 reviews.

Diwphalanx CD

Southern Lord CD

Double LP versions

Pressing History

Year	Label	Format	Country	Out of Print?	Notes
2005	Diwphalanx Diwphalanx Records Diwphalanx Records is a Japanese punk/metal record label. It releases primarily Japanese bands.-Artist list:*Antiseen*Balzac*Banana Shakes*Bitter Sweet Generation*Blue Beat Players*Boris*Church of Misery*Central*Cool Wise Men*Dead Pan Speakers...	CD	Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...	No	Some copies featured a die-cut sleeve around the jewel box
2005	Diwphalanx Diwphalanx Records Diwphalanx Records is a Japanese punk/metal record label. It releases primarily Japanese bands.-Artist list:*Antiseen*Balzac*Banana Shakes*Bitter Sweet Generation*Blue Beat Players*Boris*Church of Misery*Central*Cool Wise Men*Dead Pan Speakers...	2xLP	Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...	Yes	Ltd. 500. Deluxe 2xLP featuring a die-cut "stencil" cover and extended cuts of "Pseudo-Bread", "My Machine", "Farewell" and "Just Abandoned Myself"; different track listing
2006	Southern Lord Southern Lord Records Southern Lord is an American record label that was founded in 1998 by Greg Anderson, specializing in what could broadly be classified as experimental heavy metal, particularly the doom metal, stoner rock, and drone metal sub-genres. Some of the more notable artists on the label include Earth, Om,...	CD	US United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...	No	Different cover from Japanese pressing; has same audio overall as the Japanese CD apart from featuring the same extended cut of "Just Abandoned Myself" as the Japanese 2xLP. The cover art features pictures by the poet and artist William Blake William Blake William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...  depicting Satan Satan Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...  from his illustrations to John Milton John Milton John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell... 's Paradise Lost Paradise Lost Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse... . The album also comes with three paintings of devil imagery on sheets of what resembles perforated "blotter paper," usually associated with LSD. Also, the misspelling of 'abandoned' to 'abondoned' on the album sleeve and online MP3 MP3 MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...  tagging seems to be intended.
2006	Southern Lord Southern Lord Records Southern Lord is an American record label that was founded in 1998 by Greg Anderson, specializing in what could broadly be classified as experimental heavy metal, particularly the doom metal, stoner rock, and drone metal sub-genres. Some of the more notable artists on the label include Earth, Om,...	2xLP	US United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...	Yes	Ltd. 6000. Pressed on 180g pink marble (2000), clear pink (2000) and black vinyl (2000); has same audio overall as the Japanese 2xLP; same cover art as the US CD
2007	Southern Lord Southern Lord Records Southern Lord is an American record label that was founded in 1998 by Greg Anderson, specializing in what could broadly be classified as experimental heavy metal, particularly the doom metal, stoner rock, and drone metal sub-genres. Some of the more notable artists on the label include Earth, Om,...	2xLP	US United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...	Out of print; still available	Ltd. 2000. Pressed on 180g icy pink (1000) and deep red (1000); has same audio overall as the Japanese 2xLP; same cover art as the US CD