A couple of months ago, I wrote here that Lady Gaga was the godmother of the new generation of ostentatiously “theatre kid” pop stars – but actually, perhaps I was wrong and Miley Cyrus deserves that title. Ever since her teens, she has consistently gone the extra mile in adding pizazz and razzle dazzle to a gloriously messy discography and personal presence, smashing together her Disney Channel past and country royalty family ties with garish influences from across club and hip hop culture and a punkish, pansexual, psychedelic presentation that, given where she’s come from, makes her perhaps more subversive than Gaga.
She’s certainly going that extra mile here, with her eighth LP being the soundtrack to a “visual album” that is being released next month in cinemas, inspired by psychedelic experiences, 2018 ultra-violent narcotic revenge movie Mandy,and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Even without the movie, you can hear the ambition seeping out of every sound. This album, crucially, sounds like a billion dollars – you can instantly hear how it will blast out of cinemas’ Dolby Atmos systems, with every abstract crackle and rumble beautifully crafted, but never for novelty value, always woven intricately into guitars, string sections, bubbling disco synths, and Cyrus’s own voice which she only continues growing into.
She seems absolutely on top of it all too – the personality of her voice, the consistency of the apocalyptic/hopeful duality (“let’s pretend it’s not the end of the world” lays out a key theme, and it keeps coming back to loss and rebirth, with explicit reference to the “ego death” of the terrifyingly powerful psychedelic DMT) – and all of this is done in a hugely accessible way, too. It’s built on a framework of vintage AOR / soft rock, with diversions into soul and 1980s disco-pop neatly integrated, with all the air-grabbing high drama of the best of those styles, and amazingly the exquisite production making it sound very fresh, not simply referential, even on a song like “Walk of Fame” which DOES directly reference songs by Bronksi Beat, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, New Order, Pet Shop Boys and about a dozen other Eighties classics.
All of this effort and achievement, though, means the songs need to be as grand as the vision – and all too often they aren’t. You may find yourself willing them to get there, as on “More to Lose” which gets so close to being one of those vast power ballads that someone like Cher or Boston might have belted out, but doesn’t quite take flight. “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” is another electropop banger, again mind-blowing in its sound construction and again with Cyrus singing from her soul, but the hooks are just a whisker away from mightiness – and Naomi Cambpell popping up to do a spoken verse that is just pure Ab Fab doesn’t help, either. That said there are real high points – the full on DMT pop of “Reborn” is genuinely intense, “Easy Lover” has a fantastic loping funk and you could easily imagine it as a Gnarls Barkley song. And the glorious production and arrangements make you want to come back for more. Yet another wonderfully messy instalment in a brilliantly messy career – and maybe, maybe a hint of the masterpiece she surely has in her yet.
Listen to "Easy Lover":
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