Yahoo Lifestyle Lady Gaga Returns to Her Dance Floor Roots — and Has a Blast — on ‘Mayhem’: Album Review
While it’s a welcome and always entertaining aspect of her fashion, Lady Gaga has historically tended to overdress her art. Anyone who’s followed the arc of her career knows that she frames every era around a concept, maximizing — sometimes over-maximizing — whatever significance she gives it. Often, it works, like with the political flag-waving of “Born This Way,” or the journey towards healing on “Chromatica.” But it’s when she gets in her own way that her vision falters — last year’s “Harlequin,” for instance, was a stunning lesson in giving into impulse; “Artpop” assigned meaning where there wasn’t much of it.
Gaga didn’t really mythologize “Mayhem,” her seventh album, or its music, in the lead-up to its release. “I actually made the effort [while] making ‘Mayhem’ to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit,” she told Apple Music. On “Mayhem,” she dials back to her purest form by invoking the simplicity of “The Fame,” her 2008 debut that used the artifice of pop music to question its meaning. This is dance floor Gaga as we once knew her, free from the pretension that often casts a shadow on her catalog, and across “Mayhem,” she sounds like she’s having fun, for the first time in a long time.
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The return-to-form album can typically succeed on the back of familiarity; day-one fans will always be chasing the high that an artist’s breakthrough once offered. That approach can play tough, though, if it leans too far into the past. Over the last year, Justin Timberlake and Katy Perry did just that, using old tropes to forge shaky paths forward.
But Gaga has a way of revitalizing the touchstones of her earliest work on “Mayhem” without it feeling nostalgically lopsided. There are callbacks to former glory — “Don’t Call Tonight,” for instance, is the spiritual successor to “Alejandro” — but it sounds contemporaneously fresh, in lockstep with modern-day pop without chasing its most obvious conventions. That’s largely because she sticks to the core of what’s made her one of this century’s most enduring superstars. “Mayhem” is enjoyable ephemera, as tart and simple as it is sophisticated and precise.
“Abracadabra” suggested that she’d follow through on the promise of high-impact, low-stakes art; “Mayhem” executes on that without ever thinking too much of itself. It’s communicated in tracks most true to the sound she developed with RedOne on “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster,” namely on “Garden of Eden,” a snapping sweet treat so aligned with that aesthetic that it could have slotted neatly on either of those projects. (Little Monsters are already hypothesizing that it’s a reupholstered version of “Private Audition,” a Darkchild-produced demo from that era.) “Shadow of a Man” struts with the type of cool of wearing sunglasses at night; the David Bowie-referencing “Vanish Into You” builds towards its chorus with the same tension as “Bad Romance.” Lyrically, she’s often back to where she started, falling over in her nine-inch heels on “Eden” and assessing the dark side of fame a la “Paparazzi” on “Perfect Celebrity.”
Gaga sat at the helm for “Mayhem,” executive producing alongside her fiancé Michael Polansky and Andrew Watt, the former Miley Cyrus collaborator who’s become a classic rock revitalizer for Elton John, the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney. She produced across the 14 tracks with Watt, Cirkut and Gesaffelstein — all artisans who have consistently bent the boundaries of their respective genres. “Mayhem” benefits from its manicured team and its songs are never overcomplicated, only varied. There’s bits of funk, greasy grunge and Antonoffian synth-pop, and Gaga doesn’t try hard to play hide-the-influence: “Killah” featuring Gesaffelstein has the industrial throb of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”; “Zombieboy” is ripped out of the Chic handbook; and “How Bad Do U Want Me” is, quite plainly, cast in the same mold as Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.”
But it feels distinctly Gaga, in ways that Gaga records only can, even at their most self-indulgent. Which is why, of course, “Mayhem” wouldn’t be a Gaga album if there weren’t at least a few of those moments. “Die With a Smile,” her duet with Bruno Mars, appears at the tail-end of “Mayhem,” the last in a closing trifecta of songs that give in to her predilection for dramatic balladry. (“Blade of Grass” even has a theatrical key change.) “Smile” was her biggest hit in years, a schlocky lounge tune that suggested that what audiences wanted most from her was a muted version of herself, one who can easily coast on digestible (and frankly cliché) tropes.
“Mayhem” largely benefits from playing against that type. The album is a re-centering of sorts, a reminder that beyond all the artifice and intellectualism of her catalog, Gaga is at her best when she boils down ideas to their tastiest kernels. “Mayhem” isn’t unnecessarily overthought or ornate; Gaga sounds unencumbered, free from the lofty expectations that both she and her audiences have placed on her. Fame is a tricky thing to achieve, and even more difficult to maintain — no one knows that more than Gaga, and as it turns out, being the truest version of yourself is the best way to do it.
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