Review Summary: Gaga is good.
Lady Gaga’s entire career has attempted to answer one question-
Who is Gaga? The question itself, divorced of any context, sounds tantalizing enough, but Stefani Germanotta has always made the ride intriguing, if not fun. Her earlier work declared “She’s an icon!” with increasing confidence while the latter half has pleaded the inverse: “She’s a human.” The push-pull dynamic with where the target of her longing lies has created an adventurous, breathtaking career full of hits, but, outside of
The Fame Monster, Gaga has always seemed to dangle the full picture just outside of the margins. Her latest,
Mayhem, throws another tautological explanation -Gaga is Gaga. The greyscale cover features shattered reflections of Gaga’s face, representing the sliding scale of black and white that have accompanied each iteration and character that Gaga has been.
At least, I hope that’s the explanation for the cover.
In truth,
Mayhem is Gaga’s most straightforward release yet. Its fourteen songs dispense with any pretense of gay dance planets or exploring the ghost of a relative she barely knew, replaced by an unwavering confidence that these songs will be enough. Thankfully, they are, but it still makes the album’s aesthetics a tad confusing. Lead singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra” covered her music in leather and spikes (which ruled) to suggest some darker exploration of Gaga as self, but the bulk of the tracklist is brighter and sweeter than anything since
The Fame. “Killah” is the most deceiving of the bunch, pulling an impressive switcheroo by revealing its Gessafelstein feature to be grounds for taking a stab at Prince and Bowie (and St. Vincent) with a stank face-inducing lower end that would, as the song suggests,“make the curtains cream.” “How Bad Do U Want Me” feels like a tongue-in-cheek attempt at the modern (bad) iteration of Taylor Swift’s lifeless synthpop that is every bit the knockout that Gaga dropping a weight class would be -there’s even a stratospheric bridge that calls “Cruel Summer” to mind.
The throughline here is its carefree sense of fun and exploration. True to the album’s title, the sonic palette here is a little all over the place with smatterings of disco (“Vanish Into You”) and hard rock (“The Beast”). “Perfect Celebrity” is yet another addition to her ongoing dialogue with fame, but this time is met with playful arena rock that helps to cancel out the bitter taste and turn a middle-finger gesture into devil horns*. “Shadow Of a Man” and “LoveDrug” provide some sonic consistency by going for a bit of an evil Abba vibe that contains Ratatat-esque guitar licks that hit pay dirt for some of the most moment-to-moment fun throughout.
*You can hear the ear-to-ear grin on that Princess Di line.
If there’s one sin that
Mayhem commits, it’s that it all feels a bit slapdash. Make no mistake, this is the happiest and most creative Gaga has sounded in years with jaw-dropping production and vocal performances throughout, the lack of Big Picture theming does leave an empty space relative to her catalog. Little of the album ever actually dips in quality (“Don’t Call Tonight” is the only real leftover nacho), but the confusing aesthetics of the album cover and the decision to tack “Die With a Smile” on here do go a long way to making this package feel a tad disjointed and lacking a bow.
Still, the aesthetic failings are only a disappointment because the contents are so dang good, and past results succeeded on an all-time level.
Mayhem may not quite reach that peak, it stands taller than (almost)* anything else from Gaga in the past decade. While Gaga has spent the last few cycles and projects winning awards as proof of her legendary talent to everyone, it finally sounds like she has won over the most important person of all: herself.
*The inevitable reappraisal of
Harlequin will be glorious.
