The Miley Cyrus story has gotten increasingly interesting as of late. As per usual with child pop stars she’s had her big public meltdown and decided to go all “Sexy” image wise, and par for the course the tabloids and tv news stations have been eating it up. After her now notorious VMA performance with Robin Thicke I think a solid two weeks went by where I didn’t go a day without Miley showing up in my facebook feed, Miley showing up on the evening news, Miley’s face miraculously appearing on my grilled cheese sandwiches; it was insane. Not being a tween suburban girl, this seemed particularly odd. Why were my friends posting about Miley Cyrus? Why was Brian Williams telling me about her exploits? Why was it in MY grilled cheese she was appearing? We had entered an inescapable Mileyverse, which permeated America like the smog in Beijing.
After about a week of this I was unsurprisingly sick of talking about the former Disney Channel child star. ‘’Aren't we like, considering going to war with Syria?”, I asked the void. “Isn't France engaging in a pretty serious military conflict with Mali Right now? Doesn't that take priority over asking whether some pop star on the VMA’s shaking her ass is “racial appropriation”?” The flame wars and newscasts continued and after a while I just started to drown it out and stop paying attention as much as I could, but every time something new came out it got at least a head turn. Between “Miley is naked on top of construction equipment in her new video for some reason!” and “Miley Cyrus sang in front of a montage of giant kittens at the AMA’s during her performance of Wrecking Ball!” it was really hard for even me to ignore some of this. Over the course of her coming-of-age freakout something about this girl’s aesthetic had become bizarrely and honestly kind of delightfully post-modern. The cats, the giant teddy bears, the weird awful fever dream that was the “We Can’t Stop” video, its like 4chan had suddenly been given charge of creating Miley’s image. And I can’t lie, I kind of approved.
All of these recent thoughts and events were floating around my mind as I sat down to finally listen through Miley’s new album “Bangerz” for this review. I went in expecting a terrible but probably amusing trainwreck of an album. This is why it came as a surprise to me when I took out my headphones after the last song and realized with simultaneous feelings of pleasant surprise and disappointment, that much of what I had listened to over the past fifty or so minutes was actually pretty good.
Now to be fair this is not how I felt starting out. The album starts out with “Adore You” which is among the most paint by numbers, boring love ballad that I've heard on a recent release. Between the lazy piano plodding along, the entirely expected vocal line, and the old love song studio fallback of synth strings, track feels like it could have been written by literally any female pop star of the past twenty years. Needless to say I was disappointed. This wasn't at all what I was expecting from the “new era” of Miley. It wasn't even amusingly bad! But as the song ended and began to fade into the next one I found myself legitimately interested again.
“We Can’t Stop” has been on the radio for a while now and there’s been a lot of commentary about its cultural importance and what it represents with the overtly sexual references and talk of doing molly and snorting lines in the bathroom. But with all that taken away, I realized that musically, this was a step in the right direction. The piano line by itself isn't much, but once combined with the drums which layer on, and the incredibly well chosen synth, it becomes memorable in an actually positive way. The sound had me thinking of synthpop from the likes of Shiny Toy Guns or even The Birthday Massacre, and I was impressed with how distinctly unlike current pop music it sounded. I also have to give her some credit for the bizarre music video which the song received, which more or less debuted the aesthetic of the new Miley to the public, and which I still find at least interesting moments in. Just watch it and tell me you don’t find yourself still thinking about it and saying ‘What the fuck did I watch” days later.
The next track “Bangerz” is unfortunately pretty bad. This appears to be Miley’s “I’m a strong independent woman who don’t need no man” track for the album, and is filled with a distinct Black Eyed Peas vibe. They have that cumbersome low bass beat that Will.i.am uses coupled with a deep robotic voice repeating “bangerz” and miley seemingly doing her best Fergie impression. That said there’s a couple of interesting moments for the synth when the more plunky electro pop type filters come on, and the use of autotune is actually interesting with electronic obviously autotuned vocals paired with clean ones.
The next song “4x4” was another one I felt strongly ambivalent about. It starts off sounding like Miley is going back to a more country-western style ala some of her older work, and she takes on a bit of a Dolly Parton drawl which would be pretty easy to make fun of. But then just as I was ready to start hating on it, Gogol Bordello style accordion and gypsy guitar come forth and forced me to like it. I legitimately can’t say this is a bad song, and to be honest, Miley sounds kind of badass here and there in this track. Nelly does a solid guest verse too, adding a much needed element of coolness to the song, and solidifying it as weirdly being pretty good. Then suddenly we get treated to “My Darling”, a plodding uber-generic love song featuring a hip-hop artist named “Future” using that always riveting sleazy auto-tune voice, leading to the song sounding like someone forced T-Pain to write a love ballad after giving him ample doses of ketamine. Such is the give and take of “Bangerz”.
The rest of the album is a mish mash of a couple good songs, a few interestingly bad songs, and one or two complete write offs. “Love Money Party” and “Maybe You’re Right” sound like Miley trying very hard to be Rihanna and Coldplay respectively and not doing a very good job, meanwhile “Do My Thang” encapsulates everything awful about the party music of the past ten years including but not limited to: bad white girl rapping, Awful David Guetta sounding beats, synth claps, dubstep drops, and pretty much everything that’s made me hate the pop music of the past decade.
On the other hand we have songs like “FU” which turns out to be a weird mish mash of dark cabaret and other anachronistic styles with modern synth, and probably the best vocals Miley Cyrus has ever put forth, which sound legitimately awesome, even by my standards. It also features the best use of dubstep style synth that I’ve ever heard in a pop song, used expertly in the chorus, and mixing awesomely with the cabaret feel. “#Getitright” while not necessarily my thing is also really well executed, essentially being a sultry-sexy summer lust song with reggae guitar, whistling, and playful keyboard parts giving it the perfect atmosphere. In my opinion it actually would have been a bit better suited to an artist like Bruno Mars, but Miley does a decent job with it so I can’t complain. The album ends with “Someone Else” which is nothing new or innovative but is a decent dance-pop type song with pretty good vocals if that's what you’re into, giving a rather anticlimactic feeling to the end of what is on occasion a pretty interesting album.
“Bangerz” left me feeling conflicted. It’s definitely one of the more schizophrenic albums I’ve heard recently, and the style seems to change about every other song which can be sort of jarring, but on the other hand it certainly prevents it from becoming a dull experience. It approaches being one of the most fascinating pop albums of the past few years, but it comes short by mixing the interesting tracks with a bunch of bad ones and boring ones. That said I can’t deny that this album thoroughly surprised me. I’ll admit it, I honestly like “Wrecking Ball” and “We Can’t Stop”. I think they’re pretty well written and have some interesting musical ideas which are outside what is currently generally found in pop music. It could just be an increased tolerance to bad pop music as a result of hours of forcing myself to listen to One Direction and Flo Rida, but I’m actually inclined to defend this album as something of a step in the right direction for current pop in terms of its experimentation and its weirdness. I don’t love it and I certainly don’t have any intent of buying it, but I don’t regret the hour I spent listening to it in the why I have with a lot of the pop I’ve reviewed. So yeah, I’m giving a positive review to “Bangerz”, what of it. Now can we stop talking about the twerking and move onto literally anything else please?
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