Decisive Pink’s Ticket To Fame is an Extravagant Plumage of Synth-Pop

An amusing and instructive moment happens about eight seconds into “Potato Tomato,” the fifth track on Decisive Pink’s debut album Ticket To Fame: After a series of tinny beats, the beginning of an odd bass line and a couple electronic squiggles, one of the project’s principals—either American singer-songwriter (and former Dirty Projector) Angel Deradoorian or Russian pop experimentalist Kate NV, presumably—lets out a genuinely startled-sounding “whoa,” as if a button they just pushed made a particularly strange or unexpected sound.

It’s a funny moment, but it’s more than that, too. The feelings embedded within that exclamation—surprise, delight, frivolity, a sense of possibility—encapsulate exactly what makes Ticket To Fame such an engaging and enjoyable listen. Here, we have an opportunity to hear two top-shelf artists come together and explore a sound that sits comfortably between them, free from expectation and abuzz with spontaneous creativity.

As it turns out, the aforementioned “Potato Tomato” is exactly the kind of studio exercise most likely to broadcast a bemused “whoa.” At just over three minutes long, it sounds like they ran tape while Deradoorian and NV tried out synth sounds in a friend’s Cologne, Germany recording space and repeated the words in the title. It’s the least-structured of the songs on Ticket To Fame, and the least successful—unless the whole point is simply to peel back the curtain a bit, in which case it works. Listening to “Potato Tomato,” you can almost picture Deradoorian and NV in the studio, which the former described as a “synth-dome” and the latter called “a spaceship.”

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The rest of the album showcases both the studio’s considerable synth-abilities and Decisive Pink’s sharp ear for vibrant, variegated electro-pop melodies. On the irresistible opening track “Haffmilch Holiday,” Deradoorian and NV sing about rejecting the frenzy and fears of modern life over a conveyor belt of synth tones—some warm and fuzzy and others clipped and chirpy. Even within the song’s call-and-response structure, their voices seem to melt into each other:

I just want silence
I want to play
Dancing outside on the grass
My own holiday
What in the world am I?
How in the world do I?
Where in the world can I?
Just get away

That’s relatable, as is the album’s penultimate track, “Dopamine,” which pairs a Seinfeld-ian robo-funk bass line with half-sung, half-spoken lyrics about loneliness, mindless consumerism and searching online for something that will fill the void in our lives. An answer of sorts comes in “Destiny,” which uses tarot card imagery, Middle Eastern sounds and hurried bleeps and bloops to challenge the listener’s inertia: “What’s your fate? Maybe it’s too late.” And then later: “Are you willing to shuffle the deck to see what comes next?”

Elsewhere, “Ode to Boy” delivers on its title in two ways: First, as a hopeful hymn to a prospective love interest and then as a Kraftwerk-ed version of the famous “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Second, “Cosmic Dancer” amiably bubbles and flutters for a bit before accelerating into a highly caffeinated synth-pop song that boasts one of Ticket To Fame’s catchiest choruses. And two tracks—the pulsing “Rodeo” and the effervescent “What Where”—showcase not only the duo’s skill on the many synths they had at their disposal, but also their adventurous approach to composition and sound collage.

Up to this point, I’ve used the word “synth” (or a variation of it) six times in this review, and yet I still feel the synths on Ticket To Fame are getting undersold. So let’s be very clear: Decisive Pink’s debut is a dancing fountain of colorful tones, a wistful rocket ride through pixelated zones, an extravagant peacock’s plumage of electro-pop and a guided tour of moods and textures achievable in synth music. It’s also a wonderful first product of Angel Deradoorian and Kate NV’s creative union. Let’s hope there’s more where it came from.

Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in the great state of Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Ben has been writing about music for more than two decades, sometimes for websites you’ve heard of but more often for alt-weekly papers in cities across the country. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.

Decisive Pink’s Ticket To Fame is An Extravagant Plumage of Synth-Pop

Angel Deradoorian and Kate NV’s first collaborative album is packed with unforgettable tones, moods and textures.