Chromatica: Reviews Thread

[daisy 246]

I only see good review.. 

 

[LGMonster95 13,704]

17 minutes ago, Aarghya said:

                                                                         Metro - 4.5/5 

She has both used the genre for her own ends, but also nominated herself as its defender. In early promo she declared that ‘pop music will never be low brow.’  Chromatica, Gaga’s sixth studio album and first solo release since 2016’s Joanne, is a return to those roots. There is certainly pop music on Chromatica, and it is definitely not low-brow, although it’s not as experimental or intelligent as some of her previous work.  This is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta we’re talking about, though, and the woman has never met a concept that she couldn’t embrace. If 2013’s ARTPOP wanted to change the face of pop on Earth, then Chromatica’s mission is to take us off our own planet entirely, and escape into a new universe, one of Gaga’s own making. 

Gaga has never lacked ambition – in fact, her entire discography can be read, at times, as a battle against her own ambitions – but Chromatica’s lofty thematics are met with an equally bulletproof approach to pop music that recalls her debutante days, when no-one seemed to command or understand the power of pop better than Lady Gaga.  Lead single Stupid Love – her first collaboration with Swedish mastermind Max Martin – set Gaga’s intentions clear from the off. This was, above all else, a return to the dancefloor, a space no other artist has battled for harder. As she sings in the cathartic Free Woman: ‘This is my dance floor, I fought for.’  Chromatica is an album about healing and about escape, it takes the transformative power of pop music and applies it to Gaga’s own trauma, that she lays bare on the record. Alice, a career-best achievement, has a stuttering, EDM beat, but speaks of its artists struggles to find a place where she truly belongs. ‘My name isn’t Alice,’ she announces. ‘But I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ The same is true for 911, a song about antipsychotic medication, where she says ‘my biggest enemy is me.’

For the Alejandro hitmaker, her battle with chronic pain disorder fibromyalgia as been well-documented, and the LP’s steam-punk aesthetic, as well as its frequent references to technology and space, seek to place Gaga away from her pain, and rebuild her as something new, somewhere new. Collaboration is a new side to Gaga that her visit to Chromatica seems to have brought out the best in; from K-pop sirens BLACKPINK in the brittle Sour Candy, Sir Elton John for the electronica-influenced rumination on mortality Sine From Above, where Gaga dreams of dying and becoming one with music again. The album’s biggest pure-pop success comes with Ariana Grande in the form of disco monster Rain On Me, a modern-day rewrite of No More Tears (Enough is Enough). ‘I hear the thunder coming down,’ Ariana croons. ‘Won’t you rain on me?’ It speaks to the horrors both she and Gaga have endured during their time both in the public eye and away from it. As we were always told, fame is indeed a monster, but one that isn’t welcome on this new planet.  We brought up ARTPOP earlier, and its a pivotal reference to make for Chromatica, that takes all the ambition and creativity of Gaga’s ill-advised third LP, but transfers its manic energy to a streamlined sheen where Gaga seems completely in control, instead of riding a manic beat and spirit too wild to tame.  The only songs that don’t land or hit particularly as hard as the rest – Replay and 1000 Doves, which must be repurposed for a 2021 Eurovision entry immediately – speak to one criticism of the album, and that it’s Gaga at her most commercial, but also her most sanitised. These songs will not change the face of pop music, as Poker Face or Bad Romance did before them, but they will make people very happy. And if true artistry is learning to accept that people need what they think they want, then who can fault her?

Fittingly, our visit to Chromatica ends on a revelatory note. Babylon – which references both the ancient city the song takes its name from and a clever play on the nature of gossip – will be played at gay clubs across the galaxy for years to come, alongside its sonic sister, Vogue by Madonna – both songs that address the need for acceptance on the dancefloor, whether’s it BC or AD. ‘Talk it out, babble on, battle for life,’ Gaga decrees. It’s an M.O that she’s fulfilled well with Chromatica, the most cohesive and coherent album since 2011’s well-meaning but overshot Born This Way.  Lady Gaga understands pop music like no other, but sometimes she’s guilty of letting the art overshine the pop. With Chromatica, she both makes a comeback and an artistic re-birth. No pop album this year has made us happier to listen to.

https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/29/lady-gaga-chromatica-review-freeing-dance-opus-exorcises-ghost-ARTPOP-12775026/?ito=cbshare

Will it count for metacritic?

[Jonathanholland 5,108]

' “911” is her strangest song since 2011 “sh it” (in a good way) ' 

This is sending me 

[Hype 38]

Idk if anyone is interested but Finland's biggest newpaper gave Chromatica 4/5.

https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000006523107.html

They say the album is a coherent "quality dance pop" album and compared it to Future Nostalgia (in a positive way). Also, they say that Babylon reminds Vogue and that lyrics aren't Gaga's biggest strenght. 

[Enomis 283]

How can you be a reviewer and give a B without knowing the Metascore?

No words

[Anveeroy 56,890]

                                                             The Irish Times - 4/5

The last time I mentioned Lady Gaga in The Irish Times I experienced an onslaught of online abuse, including death threats, ableist slurs and suggestions to kill myself, from her fans, her Little Monsters.

I had mentioned the singer in a review of Dua Lipa’s album Future Nostalgia, because the same week that Lipa brought her album release forward because of the coronavirus pandemic, Gaga announced she was pushing her sixth album, Chromatica, back.

Fan culture – or Stan culture, as it is known, in reference to Eminem’s 2000 single where an obsessive fan kills his girlfriend because Eminem didn’t respond to his letters – is an impassioned one: to Stan is to fight and defend your pop star against all haters and critics online. So, having experienced the effects of slighting Gaga – whom I am actually a fan of – do I play it safe and give in to the Stans or do I give an honest review? Let’s see.

When you’re as big as Lady Gaga you can be expected to reinvent pop music with every release, making it a battle between who you are as an artist and what’s expected of you as a pop star.

After her debut single, Just Dance, from 2008, became a global smash, the hits kept on coming. From the album that Just Dance appeared on, The Fame – which was reissued a year later as The Fame Monster, with the added pop-noir masterpiece Bad Romance – to Born This Way, in 2011, Gaga was an unstoppable force. If you weren’t already familiar with Grace Jones or Róisín Murphy, you could see her club-kid style and theatrical flair rubbing off on other chart music, stage performances, music videos and runways.

After those came the superbly ego-tripping ARTPOP, from 2013, her most daring piece of work, and – skipping over Cheek to Cheek, her jazz album with Tony Bennett – her country-rock outing, Joanne, from 2016, named after her aunt who died, and her most personal release yet. Both are considered commercial flops, and they mark the point in Gaga’s career where casual fans dropped off and superfans intensified. Shallow, her Oscar-winning duet with Bradley Cooper from the 2018 film A Star Is Born, was her first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2011.

So what do you do when your most artistically challenging and your most personal album fail to reach the heights you’d previously set for yourself? You give the fans what they want, and what they want is clear-cut pop songs... with zero jazz trimmings.

Chromatica is not just a return to fully fledged pop music for the brilliant New Yorker, with sleek production by Gaga and the EDM-pop producers BloodPop, Burns, Axwell and Tchami; it is also the establishment of a dystopian planet where all people, sounds and colours mix. That concept, reminiscent of The ArchAndroid, Janelle Monáe’s sci-fi wonder from 2010, fails to properly materialise here, with the musical interludes sounding as if they belong on a different album. Instead Gaga works through a lifetime of woes to find the light in the disco ball at the end of the tunnel.

On Rain on Me, her duet with Ariana Grande, she celebrates the freedom in crying (“I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive”) through droplets of French house, and on the robotically snippy 911, a song about her relationship with antipsychotic medication, she addresses her inner critic while providing an exquisitely trippy chorus. Sour Candy, her collaboration with the K-pop superstars Blackpink, is the perfect mix of weirded-out pop and euphoria thanks to the palpitating bassline, which doesn’t sound unlike Maya Jane Coles’s What They Say, Katy Perry’s Swish Swish and Azealia Banks’s Anna Wintour.

Inspired by songs such as Touch Me, by Rui Da Silva, and Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless), by Crystal Waters, and by acts such as Leftfield, Skream and Underworld, Chromatica takes the familiar club music of the 1990s and puts it into an intergalactic setting, her voice cranking from deliberately disengaged to Viking roar to match the mood or persona.

The rare lows come in the shape of Free Woman and Fun Tonight, which is more Love Island theme song than Leftfield, but Sine from Above, her song with Elton John, is a surprising clatter of redemption and electronica. It’s Creamfields with sequins and studded boots.

That pressure on Gaga to “save pop” – a hyperbolic responsibility that most women in pop are landed with – in each new era is monumental. In a cut-throat world you are only as good as your last release, so in a critical, commercial and cult sense, what do you lose as an artist in order to maintain success? Do you make creative decisions based on your fans, your critics or yourself?

“The scars on my mind are on replay, the monster inside you is torturing me,” she confesses over warbling disco synths on Replay, a song that evokes waking up from a blackout at a party without knowing how you got there. “Who was it that pulled the trigger, was it you or I?” she asks, “I won’t blame myself ’cause we both know you were the one.”

With Chromatica, Gaga has certainly given her fans the record they want. Let’s just hope she didn’t sacrifice too much for their pop salvation.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/lady-gaga-chromatica-review-a-star-is-reborn-in-this-return-to-fully-fledged-pop-1.4265662

[Anveeroy 56,890]

Just now, Aarghya said:

The last time I mentioned Lady Gaga in The Irish Times I experienced an onslaught of online abuse, including death threats, ableist slurs and suggestions to kill myself, from her fans, her Little Monsters.

Who did these? 

[andy232000 9,122]

This is the first time in years I have truly been disappointed so immensely by an album of hers. I really wanted to like it but everything sounds the exact same. Im giving it a couple more listens and its definitely better on a second try, but I gotta say im surprised its getting good reviews. If anything I would’ve guessed this would get ARTPOP level criticism

[Anveeroy 56,890]

46 minutes ago, LGMonster95 said:

Will it count for metacritic?

 I don't think so..

[Fanta 5,019]

Praying for a 5/5 or 10/10 rating from at least one publication, I want to see critical acclaim. 

[buzzkill 3,949]

4 minutes ago, andy232000 said:

This is the first time in years I have truly been disappointed so immensely by an album of hers. I really wanted to like it but everything sounds the exact same. Im giving it a couple more listens and its definitely better on a second try, but I gotta say im surprised its getting good reviews. If anything I would’ve guessed this would get ARTPOP level criticism

This thread is not for personal reviews

[Anveeroy 56,890]

The Times (UK) : 4/5 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lady-gaga-chromatica-review-the-pop-stars-glossy-upbeat-eurovision-audition-t6jdkj6ch

[BleepBloop 10,191]

1 minute ago, Aarghya said:

The Times (UK) : 4/5 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lady-gaga-chromatica-review-the-pop-stars-glossy-upbeat-eurovision-audition-t6jdkj6ch

LMAO the Eurovision comparisons just won't end

[Anveeroy 56,890]

Just now, Sneaky said:

LMAO the Eurovision comparisons just won't end

I blame the Brexit 

[Sorcerer 10,516]

Music OMH: 4 stars

https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/lady-gaga-chromatica