As with pop to shock, titillate, and- if you're Miley Cyrus- assault your musical senses, nothing measures up to the ex-Disney star's latest surprise album which was released during the MTV Video Music Awards on August 30. While we've witnessed Nicki Minaj's jungle-festooned performance which was later joined in concert with Taylor Swift that night, it was during a drag queen studded performance that Cyrus closed as host when a new single titled "Dooo It!" entailed an even pleasant surprise. Available online, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz promises another side to the raunchy star.
On its own, the music is punchy, offbeat. It's stuff you'd play without risking musical nausea; it's an mix up of musical styles- from '80s pop to today's indie records- that has made plenty of swerves from the Bangerz star's latest dabble into crazy hip hop. Oozing 90 minutes of tracks drenched in psychedelia, Miley Cyrus & her Dead Petz is a heavy concoction of pop and nostalgia.
However, there's very little familiarity with the early twerking, tongue tying star. That means, beside the country music image she's shed since Bangerz came on, this record is anything but the oversexualized, or the "All American". The music is hazed with dreamy vocals, singing a wide-varying list of topics in styles inspired by her predecessors. (From the absurd- "Twinkle Song"- to the deeply emotional- "Karen Don't Be Sad", there are songs like "I Get Scared" that reminds one of an early Paul McCartney). Offset that with the Miley you know, a couple of songs about high-fun and drugs were also thrown in, brewing a bizarre 23 track-album, including a ballad about a dead blowfish, that should cure us from pop's oft-late cliches.
Has there ever been a time more appropriate for pop music to evolve? If today's idea of pop is Taylor Swift, Cyrus's new album would be a one-up. Rife with colour- explicitly depicted on the album cover- the music is fresh on its own without a pop album's formula of love, boys, and breakups. It's a project borne of Cyrus's artistic freedom, which she took to her discretion after Bangerz's success. Crediting an impressive collaboration with famous help, such as Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips, Los Angeles's indie rocker Ariel Pink, and record producer Mike Will Made It, the music has the muscle of a steady pop record that could be raucuous and cheeky, and yet, too, daring, pushing boundaries few pop stars do, by introducing a marginal taste that could only be classified as "indie" to mainstream listeners.
In the Ariel Pink track, "Tiger Dreams", listeners are greeted with heavy reverb, awash with fuzzy waves that'd sweep them off with mellow overtones. And as Cyrus begins to croon ("the first who holds servility is probably right..."), everything else becomes a fuzzy blur that elicits dreamy illegible phrases masked by the occasional Auto-tune. Meanwhile, as with pop's familiar territories, "Lighter" riffs on '80s synth beats in typical fashion of a love song, "What's going on in my mind, when/ We're together, everything is so sweet..."
As the 22-year-old star explained to the New York Times, "That's what I've got the luxury to do... I can just do what I want to do, and make the music I want to make." Would this, then, suggest yet another reinvention from Miley? Frankly, it's unlikely, to say nothing that the album was an off chance from her record contract with company RCA, who knew nothing about it. But consider this a non-commercial self from the chameleonic pop idol, who's really a cultural tour de force shaking things up right now.
Thanks Miley! Now I can't stop.
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