Lady Gaga: ARTPOP - album review

Much rests on ARTPOP, and for the most part it delivers. It’s as annoying, frustrating and contradictory as its author but it’s also as brilliant, provocative and as thrilling as she can be.

At 15 tracks, it’s too long and too stodgy. A more rigorous editor would have trimmed the interminable title track and the feeble duet with R. Kelly, Do What U Want. But at its best, ARTPOP is an exhilarating musical bungee jump.

Built around stentorian keyboards, clattering electro-percussion and thumping backbeats, it’s constructed to soundtrack hair-waving, body-shaking routines at stadium shows. The startling opening triumvirate barely pause for breath as Gaga asks, “Do you want to see me naked, lover?” (no thanks, dear), on Aura, while Venus takes its lyrical cue from Europe’s The Final Countdown before she simpers “touch me, touch me” like Samantha Fox did back in 1986.

Strangely, for one so supposedly keen on empowerment, she’s a curiously submissive lyricist, whether suggesting “do what you want with my body” on Do What U Want or wailing that “I need you more than dope” on DOPE. She’s much more intriguing on the shark-eyed, rueful Fashion! and on the standout Swine, where she declares “I’m just a pig in a human body”. She has something to say: exactly what it is remains tantalisingly elusive, beyond her not entirely surprising admission on the poppy Applause that “I live for the applause”.

The only real change of pace is DOPE, where Gaga becomes a torch singer in search of a torch song, but ARTPOP is the true sound of 2013: impossibly busy, overflowing with ideas and in love with the idea of being loved.

ARTPOP is released on Monday November 11.