Lady Gaga: Born This Way – review

If so, it would certainly fit the most recent narrative – Lady Gaga's rise to the top of the pop tree has landed on a particularly wobbly branch during this album's promotional campaign. First fans grumbled that the title track bore remarkable similarity to Madonna's Express Yourself. Then disapproving voices in the gay community complained that Gaga had hijacked their sexuality as a marketing tool. So intense was the chatter around Born This Way, in fact, there was even a backlash over the artwork.

Such fears on the musical front, however, do not last long – Marry the Night's softer stylings are soon sent packing by what Gaga had always promised would be "sledgehammering dance beats". It's a pattern that holds throughout Born This Way. No matter how a song begins – pizzicato strings, operatic vocals, 80s rawk guitar – it's soon engulfed in buzzsaw synths and robo-precise rhythms. This is shameless, club-orientated pop that aims for instant impact.

Gaga has made much of the various themes on offer – religion (Judas, Bloody Mary), freedom (Road to Love), identity (Hair, Born This Way) – and these messages are hammered home rather than hinted at. Nobody expected Born This Way, hyped by Elton John as a "new gay anthem", to reference post-queer theory texts, but it's safe to say that subtlety isn't one of its strong points. Elsewhere, Hair uses follicles as a metaphor for freedom – not exactly a brave new concept for anyone who's seen the 60s musical Hair (or caught the sermon from Danny in Withnail & I for that matter).

Trite lyrics abound ("I just want to be free, I just want to be me") but these weaknesses can also be strengths, and there's something admirable about the way the aforementioned trio of tracks address confused teenagers in search of their identity. Bad Kids, in particular, is a Vince Clarke-esque stormer listing a series of flaws ("I'm a jerk", "I'm a bitch", "I'm a selfish punk") that places Gaga, like Pink, as a mainstream pop star addressing outsider America. That said, when the music drops out midway, Gaga could have come back with a slightly more hard-hitting line than "I'm a twit".

Born This Way boasts a pop vision flexible enough to be both serious (Americano embraces Latino sounds to tackle Arizona's immigration laws) and surreal (Road to Love is Journey's Don't Stop Believin' only, er, about unicorns) yet it almost always hits its target. Scheiße might be influenced by the decadent Berlin techno scene but, crucially, it has a ridiculously catchy chorus. Indeed, anyone disappointed with the singles from Born This Way, none of which lived up to Bad Romance or Poker Face, can take comfort in the fact that they are by no means the standout tracks here.

So relentless is the pace, in fact, that towards the end of this mammoth album (14 songs, plus bonus tracks), when those sledgehammer beats bash you one too many times, you do start to wish for a nice little piano ballad as a breather. That finally comes with the penultimate Yoü and I, which aims for a Hey Jude style singalong but – owing to its determination to have someone playing kitchen sink in the background – ends up as bloated as Oasis' All Around the World.

The occasional drift towards indulgence is not a total surprise. With release dates given away as "gifts" on Twitter, gigs that start out in embryonic eggs and the release of the album as a stream with an arguably bizarre choice of newspaper group, Born This Way is by far the most hyped album of 2011. Clearly one to play this down, Gaga told fans last year: "I promise to give you the greatest album of the decade." This is not that album, even by the standards of a pop star who thrives on stretching the imagination.

Gaga has surrendered her artier leanings in the quest for a pure pop record, the consequences of which are that it occasionally strays too far into cheese territory. The saxophones on Edge of Glory, for instance, are apparently a homage to Bruce Springsteen but would be equally at home on Take That's Million Love Songs. Marry the Night, meanwhile, doesn't quite shake off the feeling that its chorus had a previous incarnation as Dr Alban's It's My Life. But then this, perhaps, has always been the thrilling paradox of Lady Gaga – that she can be the most exciting, confounding and mind-bogglingly creative artist on planet pop while still sounding like an early-90s Tampax advert.

There's an unnerving moment that occurs when hearing Lady Gaga's second album, Born This Way, for the first time. It comes as soon as the plodding keyboard chords ring out on opening track Marry the Night and you wonder if the stage is set for this to be the first of several self-indulgent ballads. It will be a fear familiar to anyone who tuned into Radio 1's Big Weekend expecting a rapid-fire run through her storming pop hits and was met inexplicably with several minutes of jazz trumpet. Among the madness, the Madonna-comparisons and the meat dresses has Lady Gaga lost track of what made her little monsters fall in love with her in the first place?




source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/

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