ARTPOP

Lady Gaga’s utter lack of self-restraint sets ARTPOP apart from her earlier work (ruminate on that for a moment).

ARTPOP is a dynamic, memorable album that, while it fails to unveil the girl behind the aura, reveals a performer who finally sounds as invested in her art as she is in her image.

She doesn’t do anything wildly original with them [musical genres], but she has fun.

As pop, the album is a well-executed and entertaining tour of Gaga's tried-and-true tricks. But as art, it falls short when it comes to one basic function: making an impression.

When Gaga drops the performance shtick on “ARTPOP,” the album really finds its footing. It throbs with joy and sex and freedom, none of which Gaga has truly embodied since her debut.

The concept is artful and logical, yet ARTPOP never insinuates or settles in the subconscious; it always assaults, determined to make an impression even when all it has to say is that it doesn't have much to say.

It's Artpop's most naked, straightforward pop moments that are the album's most redemptive.

There are other duds, including the clunky arena-rock goof “Manicure” and “Donatella,” an excruciatingly lame homage to her friend Donatella Versace.... But Lady Gaga approaches other fresh modes with more spirit, particularly in a handful of songs that pull deeply from R&B

The melodies here are fine, they do a job, but nothing backs up Gag's Warholian rhetoric or scales the barmy heights of Bad Romance. [Jan 2014, p.116]

While it’s stronger than the messy ‘Born This Way’, Artpop feels little more culture-quaking than a good collection of fun, silly, well-crafted pop songs.

Her latest offering, however, lacks the key component that made the bizarre spectacles that accompanied her other albums slightly less irritating--consistently good pop songs.

Not a great pop album, then, but certainly the product of a great pop star.

For better and for worse, Artpop meets the mandate (of cranking up the cray). It's a bizarre album of squelchy disco (plus a handful of forays into R&B) that aspires to link gallery culture and radio heaven, preferring concepts to choruses.

For all of Lady Gaga’s talking points, the fusion of art and pop has resulted in a lot of familiar dance-pop--more artful for its campiness than its musical innovation.

ARTPOP wants to hide that it doesn’t have much to say.

She remains singularly compelling and lovable as a celebrity, even if her records don't always match up to her outsized persona. Even at their worst, they only prove that the art is sometimes unworthy of the artist.

Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.

It's no instant classic, then, but neither is it the calamity that some have foreseen, being a typically mixed Gaga outing with some ludicrous highs, questionable digressions (Jewels 'N' Drugs, in which three rappers add little to the mix; or Donatella, a charmless ode to the equally charmless Versace supremo) and plenty of not-unpleasant filler.

It's a decent, if flawed, pop album, its good bits good enough to keep her filling stadiums as big as the gulf between her ideas and her music.

Musically, it's pretty much the standard modern electro fare familiar from dozens of contemporaries, from Kylie to Britney. The dubstep riffs are more tortured in places, but when David Guetta and will.i.am are involved in a track's production--as with the bullishly shallow "Fashion!"--you're not straying from the mainstream.

This is two albums in a row now that were basically a bit boring, and she needs to sort it out soonish please.

For all that firepower, the music is catchy but tame--she's cozying up to chart-topping formulas rather than disrupting them.

ARTPOP is a decidedly patchy ‘Just Dance’-less disappointment.

That refusal to experiment as wildly as she once did reads as fear, and a pop star who’s afraid ends up sounding like the once-weird Lady Gaga does on ARTPOP: boring and normal.

Artpop is the third album by pop recording artist Lady Gaga. Therefore it has similarities to her previous work but is inherently different because it is a different album.

There are moments where she reminds us that she can still do wonderful things, but for the most part, Artpop shows us an artist who is trying to do too much all at once.

For as flamboyant as she is, Gaga’s never lacked sincerity; ARTPOP’s lack of substantial personal connection and its tenuous grasp on reality makes it a tough record to like.

With Artpop, Gaga sounds confused, disengaged, and at its worst, just downright bored.