Lady Gaga
Mayhem
INTERSCOPE
Everyone always asks Lady Gaga for a return to her dance-pop roots and 2008’s monster-making The Fame, despite the fact that both 2011’s socio-conscious Born This Way and 2020’s hurt-then-healed Chromatica were initially billed as just that: a regress to spry house, trembling/trebly techno, and grooving sugar-pop with the Lady’s heart newly worn well on her sleeve. So, what do people truly want then, if, indeed, Gaga is giving them the song of their dreams and their dance floors?
Mayhem sort of answers that query in a sideways fashion with its nods to Chic, Prince, NIN and David Bowie at his most disco-phonic (all four of those influences align on “Killah”), as well as slippery ’70s lounge-rock with the record’s inclusion of her #1 hit with Bruno Mars, “Die with a Smile.” The record recalls Gaga’s last several projects in its mix of tinny, metallic gothic (per Bauhaus’ definition as well as Carson McCullers’) pop and industrialized dance music with everything Nile Rodgers on top, matched with Joanne’s lean, epic balladry for poignancy. Maybe Mayhem is precisely what its title suggests: something disorderly that you can dance to, swoon with, and don black eyeshadow for—so long as your dance moves aren’t that angular crabwalk that Gaga and her troupe performed throughout the video for "Abracadabra,” itself a strangely scented house track tinged with Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Spellbound” for laughs.
And that laugh line above is there for a reason: The always-theatrical Gaga, for the first time in ages, sounds like she’s having a ball without having to overexplain why. From the cooly clipped “Garden of Eden” (a deconstructed take on her most famous non-LP demo, “Private Audition”) to the Swiftian (both Jonathan and Taylor) “How Bad Do U Want Me”; from the Bowie-esque “Shadow of a Man” and “Vanish Into You” to discoid epiphanies “Don’t Call Tonight” and “Zombieboy,” Gaga sings her heart out, with her head back and her usually wrought-hard, wrung-out lyrics tamed. Just because her writing isn’t weightily world-weary across Mayhem’s semio-texts doesn’t mean that Gaga isn’t calculating and curatorial. Before closing out her album with “Die with a Smile,” Mayhem’s penultimate track “Blade of Grass” is an 11 o’clock number if ever there was one, a schmaltzy kitchen-sink ballad with everything but a ringing gong to signal its dynamic range and reach.
Mayhem is great, gothic, and groovy, and gets to its points quickly (because there aren’t that many to count off). Rather than awarding Gaga a GRAMMY for her efforts, give this Lady a Tony for classic theatricality.
