ADRIAN THRILLS reviews: Lady Gaga: Mayhem (Interscope): Lady Gaga promises mayhem but delivers 80s power pop
LADY GAGA: Mayhem (Interscope)
Verdict: Gaga gets the party started
Despite her reputation as a madcap pop diva, Lady Gaga has (whisper it) been playing it a little safe of late.
The last we heard from her, she was faithfully reworking such vintage jazz standards as Smile and That’s Life on Harlequin, a companion album to her big screen role in psychological thriller Joker: Folie à Deux.
Before that, last July, she was playing the piano — and the traditional showgirl — on the banks of the River Seine in a surprise performance at the opening ceremony to the Paris Olympics.
Was the 38-year-old singer, once famous for her outrageous wigs and dresses made from slices of raw meat and wood shavings, growing old gracefully?
She has, after all, settled down in California with her venture capitalist fiancé Michael Polansky, and has even dropped hints about starting a family, leading some to wonder whether her days of high-octane eccentricity are behind her.
On the evidence of new album Mayhem, her loyal devotees (or ‘Little Monsters’) should fear not.
Dominated by pulsating electronic beats and 1980s-style power pop, the 14 new tracks here see the singer (born Stefani Germanotta) returning to her early, club-orientated roots — while adding a few surprisingly funky touches, before rounding it all off with three emotional ballads.
With such clever pacing, the album isn’t quite as chaotic as its title suggests.
‘Despite her reputation as a madcap pop diva, Lady Gaga has (whisper it) been playing it a little safe of late’, writes Adrian Thrills
On the evidence of new album Mayhem, her loyal devotees (or ‘Little Monsters’) should fear not
Made in Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, where Gaga worked on the soundtrack to the 2018 remake of A Star Is Born, it starts with a return to the dancefloor on Disease and Abracadabra, two solidly old-school Gaga singles, before gnarly guitars arrive on the widescreen, quasi-operatic Garden Of Eden. ‘I could be your girlfriend for the weekend,’ she teases. ‘You could be my boyfriend for the night, my excuse to make a bad decision.’
Unlike 2020’s Chromatica, inspired by a fictional planet named after a musical scale, there’s no grand concept on an album made with collaborators including Andrew Watt, who produced The Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds, and French DJ Gesaffelstein.
Perfect Celebrity is a humorous critique of fame in which Gaga likens herself to a plastic doll that people ‘love to hate’. Shadow Of A Man salutes women who are thriving a man’s world. Elsewhere, though, she just wants to have fun: Killah — underpinned by electric guitar grooves that are a throwback to Prince’s late 1980s singles Sign O’ The Times and Alphabet St — is one of the funkiest tunes she’s ever recorded.
There are nods to the 1980s. Abracadabra lifts a hook from Siouxsie And The Banshees’ Spellbound, and How Bad Do U Want Me does likewise with Yazoo’s Only You.
There are moments when Gaga’s desire to give her all gets the better of her. LoveDrug, about dealing with romantic pain, is bombastic, and the ballads are melodramatic — but it’s still good to hear her really open up her voice and let rip.
The most tender moment comes on the final track, Die With A Smile. A duet with Bruno Mars that has already won a Grammy (for best performance by a pop duo or group), it’s a 1970s-style soul ballad worthy of The Stylistics.
Already an inspiration to a younger wave of strong-minded female singers, including Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish and Sabrina Carpenter, she’s reiterating her pop-star credentials with panache.
Lady Gaga’s latest album reiterates her pop-star credentials with panache
Reviews by TULLY POTTER
WALTON: Violin Concerto (Chandos)
I doubt if Walton’s Violin Concerto has ever been better accompanied than it is by John Wilson on this new CD.
He and his crack Sinfonia of London lavish care on every note, and as Charlie Lovell-Jones, who normally leads the orchestra, plays beautifully, everything works out.
Lovell-Jones does not have a big tone but on a record that hardly matters; he is on top of every technical trick in this work written for Heifetz and handles lyrical passages well.
The programme starts with the four-movement orchestral Suite that Christopher Palmer prepared from Walton’s opera Troilus And Cressida: this too is superbly performed.
And what better to end with, than Walton’s breezy 1924-25 overture Portsmouth Point, which he often echoed in later works?
‘I doubt if Walton’s Violin Concerto has ever been better accompanied than it is by John Wilson on this new CD’, writes Tully Potter
JENEBA KANNEH-MASON: Fantasie (Sony)
It was about time that Jeneba Kanneh-Mason gave us a solo album, and her first disc for Sony is very fine.
She frames her programme with two big Romantic works, Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ Sonata and Scriabin’s ‘Sonate-Fantaisie’; the latter is particularly well performed.
The Chopin is good too, but we all have so many great benchmarks to measure it against, from the likes of Emil Gilels, Artur Rubinstein and even Sergei Rachmaninov.
Two Nocturnes by Chopin, two Preludes by Debussy and two by Scriabin are well within her range, but the most valuable tracks are three by African-American composers.
Florence Price’s Fantasie Negre No. 1 and Margaret Bonds’s Troubled Water are based on spirituals; William Grant Still’s Summerland is from his well-known suite Visions.
‘It was about time that Jeneba Kanneh-Mason gave us a solo album, and her first disc for Sony is very fine’, writes Tully Potter
