Just dance
LADY Gaga released her new album, Chromatica, on May 28 night, marking a pronounced return to the sleek dance-pop sound that made her a star more than a decade ago.
Her first studio album since the classic-rock-inspired Joanne in 2016, Chromatica follows Lady Gaga’s Oscar-nominated acting turn in director Bradley Cooper’s 2018 remake of A Star Is Born, in which she played the showbizingenue role previously portrayed by Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland. Shallow, one of Gaga’s rootsy power ballads from the movie musical, won an Academy Award for best original song.
The new record – which original April 10 release date the singer planned to celebrate with a surprise appearance at that weekend’s since-delayed Coachella festival – goes long on the type of throbbing beats and synthetic textures that Gaga was drawn to for early hits such as Just Dance, Poker Face and Bad Romance.
Her studio collaborators on Chromatica include rave-circuit regulars such as Bloodpop, Axwell, Madeon and Skrillex; the 16-track album also contains much-hyped features by Ariana Grande (Rain On
Me), K-pop girl group Blackpink (Sour Candy) and 73-year-old Elton John, who duets with the singer on the pulsing Sine From Above, about feeling young when you’re immortal. (In a possible sign of its twisted path to Chromatica, Sine From Above is credited to a whopping 13 songwriters, including Ryan Tedder and the teen-pop veteran Rami Yacoub.)
“I’ll keep on looking for Wonderland,” Gaga sings in Alice, which carries echoes of Crystal Waters’ 1991 dance staple Gypsy Woman; 911, with a lyric regarding mood-stabilising drugs, has the singer processing her voice with an android-like effect.
In a recent interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Lady Gaga described the album as being about healing and perseverance – about
“dancing through pain,” as she put it, while detailing her struggles with mental health. But Chromatica arrives, of course, just as the Covid19 pandemic has shut down the very festivals and clubs in which the singer might’ve envisioned her new music coming to life.
“I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” she told Lowe,”to show them how much I love them.” — Mikael Wood/los Angeles Times/tribune News Service
THE sheer sprawl of Notes On A Conditional Form – 80 minutes, 22 tracks – is both maddening and impressive. The 1975 are arguably the most self-aware and astute band of our phone-obsessed era: They’re earnest and ridiculous, ambitious and easily distracted, provocative and trend-hopping. They embrace pop stardom as they question its conventions.
The British quartet, fronted by Matt Healy, opens Notes as they have their previous three albums, with a version of The 1975, this time with a voiceover speech from teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. Then, abruptly, comes the punk-y, Blur-ry rush of People, followed by a sedate orchestral instrumental, then the heavily Auto-tuned electropop of Frail State Of Mind. (This is not an album for the Auto-tune-averse.)
What Notes lacks in coherence it makes up for in breadth and invention. Some of us might be partial to the My Bloody Valentine dream pop of Then Because She Goes. Others to the acoustic guitar ballad of Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America (a duet with Phoebe Bridgers). Others to loping sing-along of Roadkill. That’s a typically whiplashing (and satisfying) three-song stretch.
While the album lacks an epochal track like Love It If We Made It from 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s a rewarding, disorienting hodgepodge.