According to Lady Gaga, her seventh studio album, Mayhem, hinges on the fact that she considers herself a refracted artist. In an effort to create a portrait of kaleidoscopic light, the task at hand was to craft a variety of disparate influences into one cohesive whole; a broken mirror, reassembled into something new.
There are the traces of David Bowie on “Vanish Into You” and Prince’s fingerprints on “Killah” (featuring Gesaffelstein), especially in the crystal-clear placement of a certain guitar riff. Nine Inch Nails drip through into the grimy, raging “Perfect Celebrity,” while Michael Jackson’s spirit seemed to have briefly entered the studio during the production of “Shadow of a Man.”
But Mayhem isn’t an album of second-rate imitations. Within the LP, Gaga has collected the artists that have inspired her throughout her career and then channeled their work through the prism of the character of Lady Gaga. She is the instrument at its core, balancing homage with originality, and her versatility as a performer was the key to Mayhem ending up in league with albums like Miley Cyrus’ Plastic Hearts, and less reminiscent of an effort like Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods, evidence of the high-wire act gone wrong.
The fact that she was largely successful in playing with the ethos of pop, industrial, ’80s funk, and early 2000s dance floor bops shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. More surprising is the fact that the spiritual companion of Mayhem might just be the oft-overlooked ARTPOP, Gaga’s 2013 experiment with maximalism, indulgence, and performative nonchalance. There are lingering traces of “MANiCURE” and “Swine” in the devil-may-care energy of “Garden of Eden,” where she returns to a simpler time — specifically, one that embraces the ease of a “girlfriend for the weekend/ boyfriend for the night” arrangement. The midnight disco of “LoveDrug” offers a similar strain of escapism, but the pitch-perfect production from Andrew Watt and Cirkut, which creates room for her soaring vocals to truly breathe, shifts the song into something much more essential.
The aforementioned “Shadow of a Man” is where the album’s energy undeniably peaks. “I won’t be used for my love and left out to cry,” she growls before the propulsive chorus kicks into gear. The song is not only the most contagiously joyful offering on the album, but one of the brightest gems in Gaga’s whole discography. It’s the foil to “Abracadabra,” which settled into the dark and macabre; “Shadow of a Man,” by contrast, is an uncontainable burst of light.
Perhaps its radiance is part of the reason that after “Shadow of a Man,” the energy of the whole record noticeably dips. The song fully eclipses the next offering, “The Beast,” which features lyrics too obvious and surface-level for someone whose pen has proven to contain multitudes. “Blade of Grass” is centered on a far more original metaphor that she explores with clarity, but the song still doesn’t reach the threshold of some of her other, far more powerful piano ballads (think “Million Reasons” or “I’ll Never Love Again”).
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