SPACED-OUT GAGA STILL BURNS BRIGHT
Lady Gaga Chromatica Interscope, out now ★★★★★
SOME have hailed Lady Gaga’s reemergence as the messiah returning to save pop music.
Not even Lady Gaga at her most hubristic would suggest that pop needs saving or that she is the one to do it.
She tells us instead that she has blasted off to a solar system of her own creation. ‘I live on Chromatica, that is where I live. I went into my frame. I found Earth, I deleted it. Earth is cancelled.’ Well there’s gratitude when the rest of us are stuck within a 5km radius of home.
A Star Is Born? Collapsed. Shallow? Deep in the recesses of her mind and that of her adoring fans who she still calls her little monsters. Given her propensity for flights of fancy, it’s miraculous that she hasn’t previously tripped into Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland for inspiration. She does on Alice which follows an opening string driven instrumental, one of three that punctuate her sixth album. ‘My name isn’t Alice but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland... Where’s my body? I’m stuck in my mind,’ she sings.
Stupid Love her on point re-entry into our orbit which leaked in January found her warp speeding back to 2010 into the hienergy territory of Born This Way.
Pop is in fine fettle because we have artists such as Ariana Grande around and Gaga welcomes her onboard anyway on the effervescent splash of Rain On Me where she sings, ‘Hands up to the sky. I’ll be your galaxy. I’m about to fly.’
Gaga’s enormous following within the LGBTQ+ community may sing along lustily to the words ‘this is the dancefloor I fought for’ on Free Woman and irrespective of any conceptual idea, this works as an album of lockdown bangers par excellence.
But if you want an insight into where her mind really is, then Fun Tonight tells us it’s not all fun staying out late partying when it results in morning hangovers and a blown-out paparazzi picture.
While 911 speaks to her battles with mental illness where she sings ‘my biggest enemy is me ever since day one’. She hints at a negative reaction to some class of chemicals and asks the responders to ‘please flash the light’. On Sour Candy she sings, ‘I’m hard on the outside but if you give me time, I can make room for your love’.
But maybe that is too much analysis of what is emanating from an artifice. Sour Candy is more like a shrewd investment. It is a 160 second tie-up with Blackpink, the K-Pop girl band who are the most followed female group on Spotify. It will help raise the Korean band’s profile in the US and elsewhere, while doing Gaga’s numbers in the Far East no harm at all.
She could have just closed the hatch with another potential single Replay. After the final instrumental interlude, Sine
From Above, her duet with Elton John doesn’t get off the launchpad and 1000 Doves and particularly Babylon bring our transmission from Chromatica to a close less satisfyingly than we might have hoped.
But you will enjoy most of your visit to this part of Gaga’s galaxy.