Having portrayed the Joker’s girlfriend to disastrous effect in the appalling Joker: Folie à Deux, Lady Gaga has decided to play it straight on her new album, Mayhem.
Sadly, this awkward attempt at re-creating the magic of early hits such as Bad Romance and Born This Way is about as convincing as her on-screen Harley Quinn: it’s all make-up and no substance, suggesting an artist whose creative batteries are running on empty.
Gaga has said that Mayhem is imbued with her “love for music: a diversity of genres, style and dreams”. Yet that turns out to be blather: again and again she leans into a cartoonish nu-metal sound that aims for a chart-friendly take on Nine Inch Nails but more accurately resembles a high-level pop producer trying to sound like Limp Bizkit.
It is pummelling, overcooked and exhausting – and isn’t helped by Gaga’s often anonymous vocals, which sound not so much phoned in as delivered from the bottom of a tar pit.
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Mayhem isn’t a complete miss: the album’s opening track, the single Disease, is a fantastic slab of gothic power-pop fuelled by gravity-warping beats and a chorus that goes off like a jet-fuelled Eurovision anthem.
A similar sense of purpose informs Abracadabra, another single from the album. It’s an industrial-pop onslaught that sees Gaga going above and beyond with the chorus of “abracadabra, morta-ooo-gaga / abracadabra, abra-oo-na-na”. Try singing that in the shower: your family will think you’ve slipped, banged your head and are gurgling for help.
But after this agreeably absurd opening the album spirals into a black hole of samey pop metal: Garden of Eden brings to mind a random Spice Girl fronting The Prodigy, only in a bad way, with lyrics that are hackneyed to the point of parody (“DJ hit the lights … I could be your girlfriend for the weekend”), while Killah is a bloodless impersonation of Prince – if Prince’s secret wish were to front Nickelback. Sadly, there can be only one great pop eccentric, and Mayhem makes it painfully clear that it isn’t Lady Gaga.
One of the inspirations for Gaga’s retreat to first principles was her fiance, the tech investor Michael Polansky, who advised her to reflect on what had made her a pop star in the first place. She initially looked back with a degree of hesitation: she told the New York Times that her original sound was a product of her days as a struggling singer-songwriter in the city.
“It was a community of support, and one of the reasons I was afraid was I was so far away now from that community,” she said. “It also felt like maybe I would just be recycling something that I had done before. But ultimately I decided that I really wanted to do it and that this sonic style and aesthetic really did belong to me.”
The problem is that sometimes you can’t, and shouldn’t, go back. It’s well and good to reconnect with the artist who achieved success in the first place. But when you do so with the ambivalence that Gaga seems to have brought to the process, there’s a risk of coming off as halfhearted, as if you feel an obligation to fans to try to perform a certain way – a sensibility that is threaded through Mayhem.
Gaga diehards have copped to it, too. Online, many have described Abracadabra, in particular, as the sound of Gaga “reheating her nachos”. She didn’t disagree, telling EW, “I would say that my nachos are mine, and I invented them, and I’m proud of them.”
Mayhem makes a decent go of redeeming itself at the death through the single Die with a Smile, a chintzy Bond-theme-style duet with Bruno Mars that harks back to Gaga’s underrated collaborations with Tony Bennett. But it’s too little too late at the end of a futile stab at post-Folie à Deux reinvention.
The cardinal error is surely that Gaga has self-consciously tried to reconnect with her glittering past. It’s an unconvincing tilt at time travel that leaves her drifting in a grim karaoke limbo.
