Lady Gaga has not tired of counting on the promotional interviews of ‘Mayhem’ that his new album is a kind of study of his own “personal chaos.” Also that ‘Mayhem’ is a tribute to its beginnings playing in New York bares. In the album supposedly two gagas, the person and the Pop Star live together, as two gagas appear in some of the alternative covers of the disc.
The alleged concept of ‘Mayhem’ still does not explain the inclusion in its sequence of ‘Die with a Smile’ with Bruno Mars, an obviously strategic decision, but not artistic, no matter how much Gaga insists on the contrary. But the cohesion of ‘Mayhem’ is striking, actually.
This cohesion is not surprising, because all Lady Gaga’s albums have internal coherence, from the first to the last. Gaga is an album artist set in a style, and if ‘Chromatica’ (2020) looked at the dance-pop from Europe, ‘Mayhem’ pull glam, rock, punk, new wave and New York flavor guitars.
The glam-pop of ‘Garden of Eden’ is like ‘The Fame’ but evolved. Today’s song marks the path of ‘Mayhem’ more than singles with a dirty electro-power sound that feels surprisingly well to the dramatic pop of Stefani Germanotta. She also turns her entire teacher of ceremonies in this recording that imagines a crazy party in a disco, “under the lights.” The bodies dance, they are desired; They roll the “adrenaline” and the “candy.”
Then, ‘Perfect Celebrity’ is a rabid electro-rrunge, ‘Vanish into you’ is a Disc-Punk Bailongo, ‘Killah’ with Gesaffelstein looks in the mirror of Bowie and Blondie, ‘Don’t Call Tonight’ begins Synthwave but becomes post-Disco. And the rock guitars are noticed in ‘Shadow of a man’. The production of Circut, Andrew Watt, etc., feels luxurious to the songs.
Therefore, the place occupied by the singles in ‘Mayhem’ occupies, because the album does not follow the bestial and industrial line of ‘Disease’, much less the Gaga-Esco Dance-Pop of ‘Abracadabra’. However, both themes do serve as a bridge to enter the audience in more underground and vintage sounds. It gives the impression that Gaga came out an alternative album and that the singles came later.
‘Mayhem’ is already a supervantic album thanks to the inclusion of ‘Die with a Smile’ but, as much as Gaga and his label insist, this will never be a song of this album, starting because it is Bruno Mars’s is the first voice that sounds in it. But, if ‘Die with a Smile’ serves for the world to discover the album-game of ‘zombieboy’, welcome.
Charging …