Music|Lady Gaga"s Stripped-Down New Album Fishes for Inspiration

Lady Gaga - Perfect Illusion
Photo Lady Gagas new album careens from one aesthetic to another, but for all the flaws, it has several strong moments. Credit Collier Schorr

For almost a decade, Lady Gaga has been assiduously arguing the case that the external is the internal, that performance is authentic, that flamboyance is ideology. Her career has been predicated on demolishing conventional ideas about what it might mean to play a character with Gaga, it was never play, always work, and always true.

Though she was focused on the transformative powers of packaging, that some sort of recalibration would come was always likely Lady Gaga was always simply too focused a singer to be strictly defined by her presentation. At old concerts, when she would sit behind a piano, belting out songs, her future life as a troubadour a Billy Joel, or even an Elton John seemed almost etched in stone.

That means that her new album, the stripped-down Joanne, isnt daring or radical its logical, a rejoinder to her past and also to the candy-striped pop that surrounds her.

But while Joanne is elemental, nothing about it is bare. Instead, its confused, full of songs that feel like concepts in search of a home, small theater pieces extruded from other imaginary productions and collected in one miscellany bin. Its nave in its use of roots music and rock as signifiers of something true as if the excess of years past wasnt, somehow, its own form of sincerity.

Most frustrating, it careens from high-intensity to low, from one aesthetic to another, with lyrics that begin at trite and move somewhere quite dimmer. Perfect Illusion, the chaotic first single, is a mlange of shouts her singing is grand and unselfconscious, and not at all bad, but the result sounds like a demo in which you can hear the seams that have not yet been smoothed over. A-Yo, with its exuberant horns, tart handclaps and noodle-limp guitars, sounds like a Britney Spears parody or a song drawn from one of those live musicals that have been littering network television since the demise of Glee.

Photo The cover of Joanne.

Lyrics that the Lady Gaga of old might have delivered with slyness say, Sinners Prayer, or the political march of Come to Mama feel unappealingly dogmatic here.

Even the best parts of Joanne and for all this albums flaws, it has several strong moments dont tell a coherent story. Lady Gaga is, now as ever, an impressive if not especially nuanced singer. Often on this album, she sings with a stern, terse vibrato that codes seriousness from a distance but feels more like a simulacrum of feeling than the real thing.

Even if that is purposeful, it feels misapplied on an album that pretends to transparency, from an artist for whom the idea of performance is never far away. The title track features whats presented as the least-performed singing listen to how she flattens out the vowel sounds, as a sort of gesture of accessibility but it is too unsteady to lean on.

Lady Gaga has arrived unadorned before; over the last couple of years, it has become something of a default mode: her collaboration with Tony Bennett on the album Cheek to Cheek, which won the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album last year, or her Sound of Music tribute at the Oscars the same year. These performances were ostentatious in a different way n**e makeup, but makeup nonetheless.

These moves, and Joanne, too, serve as an overcorrection to the garish eccentricity of Artpop, her last album, which flopped. Except garish eccentricity is one of Lady Gagas comfort zones, and that albums lack of success had more to do with overemphasizing the nonmusical aspects of Gagas character than her lack of fluency with music.

So, on Joanne, she goes on a fishing expedition for inspiration. No pop album in recent memory has featured such a wide array of collaborations that strip those collaborators of their particular charms. Mark Ronson appears throughout this album, as a songwriter and producer, but theres precious little of his reliable funk. Dancin in Circles, a songwriting collaboration with Beck, sounds like a No Doubt demo. Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age plays guitar on a handful of songs, but none with anything close to his usual ferocity. The Florence Welch duet Hey Girl sounds like Motown, but Ms. Welchs singing isnt nearly as brazen as it ordinarily is (though it easily outclasses Lady Gagas).

The only guest who holds her own here is the songwriter Hillary Lindsey, one of the most effective Nashville writers of the 2000s, and a master of the deeply felt king-size ballad. On Million Reasons (Lord show me the way/to cut through all this worn out leather), she tethers Gaga to something like a country ballad but cant keep her there for long.

Even when Lady Gaga was at her pop peak, she wasnt quite at its center she was a loud outsider summiting pop music by force of will and shock of glam. As a result, her music can seem like an old memory, not a recent one. And pop moves quickly: Note her recent tiff with the club-pop dopes in the Chainsmokers, who said in an interview that they didnt enjoy Perfect Illusion. She responded, coolly, on Twitter, in what felt like a mother dismissing an impudent child.

Which is fair: The Chainsmokers dont see dance music as avant-garde theater or sociopolitical provocation. They see it as quick-stepping pop, which, though its fuzzy in the rearview, is also part of Lady Gagas legacy. That they were allergic to Perfect Illusion makes sense. But instead of taking offense and tossing off a tweet, she should maybe give them a call.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/arts/music/review-lady-gaga-joanne.html