There is perhaps no taller order in pop criticism than an unbiased Lady Gaga review.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done; you have an opinion about Lady Gaga. Though her titanic, nearly improbable reign over popular culture has died down in the past several years, she never really left the spotlight. Since 2014, she has recorded an album of duets with Tony Bennett, won a Golden Globe, performed a lauded tribute at the Oscars and then was nominated for an Oscar herself.
All of these moves felt like a calculated response to a public sense of Gaga exhaustion. Though history has been kind to 2011’s “Born This Way,” Gaga’s behemoth chainsaw of a disco-rock record, its release marked a downturn in her public perception — even the faithful eventually turned on her particular brand of outsized theatricality by 2013, when she released the reviled “ARTPOP.”
So here we are, three years after “ARTPOP” caused Gaga the Provocateur to retreat into the shadows, waiting with bated breath to see what’s been cultivating in the mind of the woman who once wore a dress made of several Kermit the Frogs.
The answer? Confusing.
“Joanne,” named after Gaga’s late aunt, is a head-scratching listen. Veering wildly from electro-rock to folk-pop to psych-soul and back, the record never really plants its feet, even as individual moments remind us why Lady Gaga ever captured the public’s attention as thoroughly as she did.
First, the good news.
Opener “Diamond Heart,” whose title is a knowing wink to the heart-shaped rock she received from ex-fiancee Taylor Kinney, seamlessly blends the album’s dominant influences into a four-minute triumph. Gaga snarls over thundering drums about her roots as a gogo dancer, cheekily referring to herself as “young, wild, American,” before landing firmly in Springsteen territory with a lilting classic-rock chorus.
Equally strong are “Dancin’ In Circles” — a fiery ode to masturbation co-written by Beck that wouldn’t feel out of place on 2009’s “The Fame Monster” (it marries the subject matter of that album’s “So Happy I Could Die” and the bassline of “Alejandro”) — and “A-YO,” a funky, Eagles-referencing hand clapper. Gaga’s vocals are crisp, clean and free of the showy melodrama she dips into elsewhere.
Perhaps the best way to describe what goes wrong with “Joanne” is to look at how Gaga and her co-producer Mark Ronson have been talking about it. In numerous interviews, the pair have been quick to call it Gaga’s most personal work, which is one of the most terrifying sentences in pop music.
There are, perhaps, a couple of songs on “Joanne” that mean a lot to Lady Gaga. The title track, with its quiet percussion, tenderly plucked guitar and relatively understated vocals, is a tribute to her late aunt whom she never actually met.
The soaring chorus has her asking “Girl / Where do you think you’re goin’?” which is a beautifully understated way to speak to someone who has passed. Unfortunately, Lady Gaga the songwriter excels at making strange, canny images and building atmospheres, and when the song goes for small and wrenching in its verses, it ends up sounding like a limp Hallmark card.
Also a misstep is the bizarre electro-country fuzz of “John Wayne,” which sounds good on paper — a nutso disco instrumental, a hilarious spoken intro, lines like “Blue collar and a red-state treasure / Love junkie on a three-day bender” — but collapses into itself by the time its too-woozy, overproduced chorus rolls around.
Even the missteps, though, sound generally good. “Joanne” features little of the sonic sludge that characterized “ARTPOP” and instead sounds, on every song, like it knows exactly what it is setting out to do.
Overwrought album closer “Angel Down,” a beautifully sung number that suffers from the same lack of detail that mars the title track, features a glitch harp, a funereal organ and enough reverb to make it sound as though it’s being yelled from the heart of a cathedral.
From anyone else, “Joanne” would count as a confounding pop artifact that tries to do too many things at once. We’ve come to expect that from Lady Gaga, though. What makes the album disappointing by her standards is its sense of identity crisis. Plenty can be said about Lady Gaga, but never before has it been easy to say that she doesn’t know exactly who she is on record.
Here, it’s less clear-cut. There’s the straight-country “Million Reasons,” a gorgeous if generic ballad, the bizarre retro-soul homage “Come to Mama,” which the Lady Gaga of five years ago would have filled with a knowing wink, and lead single “Perfect Illusion,” a sledgehammering dance track that feels like a concession when taking in the full album.
Straddling genre lines is all good, but here it seems like it’s being done as an insurance policy against alienation.
At the end of the day, Lady Gaga is still compelling. She is still one of the most impressive vocalists in pop music. “Joanne” still features a number of worthwhile moments and a stellar production team. But for all that’s been made of her rebranding and her affinity for the chameleon, put it on the record that “careful” is one of her least compelling alter-egos in a while.
