Miley Cyrus - Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz

Pitchfork 30

Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz dropped from the sky to cap off last weekend’s Cyrus-hosted VMA Awards like so much phallically-deployed glitter. The free 23-track album, written and recorded outside the governance of Cyrus' label and co-produced in large part by Wayne Coyne and other Flaming Lips members, appeared on Sunday accompanied by a New York Times interview where Cyrus detailed its making. In it, she recalls being told by her team that the album was too long. She proceeded to add "Miley Tibetan Bowlzzz", as an impetuous reminder that Cyrus plays by no one’s rules but her own. That pretty much says it all: Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

It would be hard to imagine Cyrus and Coyne’s talents combining to worse results: there’s nothing here as pleasant as her appearances on the Flaming Lips’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover album last year, nor are these collaborations audacious enough to fail in exciting ways. Mostly they are tossed-off Diet Yoshimi detritus, the kind of music these guys can fart out in their sleep. There are bright spots, many of them via former mentor Mike WiLL Made It’s handful of productions. But on the whole Dead Petz is a borderline unlistenable slog through dorm-room poncho bullshit and blissfully ignorant acid koans ("Can’t you see, all the clouds are dying?"), delivered earnestly from an ex-child star seemingly unaware of how fundamentally inseparable her own privilege is from her "do whatever the fuck you want all of the time" ethos, and enabled by a 54 year old who should know better.

Take "Dooo It!", the album's single of sorts. There's a lot going on in the track—weed, flying saucers, queries about the origins of the moon—but the part I keep coming back to is Cyrus proclaiming, "Peace, motherfuckerz! Do it!" Far be it for me to dash the idealistic, psilocybin-fueled dreams of a 22-year-old multi-millionaire whose emancipatory phase has swerved from ratchet-lite twerk ambassador to proudly pansexual LGBTQ advocate and Wayne Coyne bestie: she’s figuring it out, as 22-year olds do, though rarely from such a precipitous platform. But still: "Do it!" As if it were just that simple.

But that’s why having an editor is important, and why "No parents! No rules!" is almost always better as a slogan than as a creative mode. "Self-control is not something I am working on," Cyrus trills on Mike WiLL cut "Slab of Butter (Scorpion)", and while she seems to be having a blast, we are left with the utterly pointless witch-house skid mark "Fuckin Fucked Up" (not to be confused with "I’m So Drunk"), and "BB Talk", a rambling monologue that wastes one of the album’s few salvageable hooks. "1 Sun" namedrops Grace Jones alongside tuneless invocations to "Wake up, world! Can’t you see the earth is crying?" There is a twee piano ballad about a dead blowfish friend, who her human friends eat at sushi dinner. The circle of life, man. (She fake-cries at the end.)

Presumably, Cyrus will look back on all this and laugh, having learned something about herself and about making art, and move on, as she seems to have done with 2013’s Bangerz. And there are moments of promise here—most often, when Coyne backs off a bit. She’s much better at love songs than drug songs. "Space Boots" streamlines the album’s cosmic vibes into an electro pulse somewhere between Kavinsky and Rilo Kiley, with sweet, direct lyrics that pierce through the fog of bullshit: "I get so high cause you’re not here smokin’ my weed/ And I get so bored/ Cause you’re not here to make me laugh." Best of all is "Lighter", a stunning, '80s-nodding Mike WiLL ballad that poignantly redeems the general "whoa, dude" vibes: "We never get to see ourselves sleeping peacefully next to the ones that we love," she sings. It’s genuinely moving.

Cyrus returns to idealized depictions of sleep and dreams often here, and given how hyper-regimented most of her life must have been, her attraction to relinquishing control to drugs or the subconscious makes sense. But for all the Instagram nudes and real talk about gender and sexuality in the press, very little of Dead Petz reveals much about Cyrus beyond the bacchanalia and non-sequiturs. I can’t shake the sense that Dead Petz exists more as a glorified VMA party favor than as a work that can stand on its own.

Speaking of: the biggest irony of Cyrus’ clash with Nicki Minaj is that if Cyrus were to pay closer attention, she might recognize Minaj as a trailblazer for the career path she's trying to take—a massively famous woman who does things the "wrong" way, pisses a lot of people off in the process, and refuses to give a fuck. As far as surrealist pop albums this decade, it doesn’t get much ballsier than Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded. But the stakes there were huge, and there is literally nothing at stake for Cyrus here. In a way, Dead Petz is a fascinating milemarker of pop music in the post-album, post-Internet era: a major pop album that lands with a splash, then sinks like a brick, as ephemeral as the Tumblr culture Cyrus draws from. Maybe that’s the most visionary aspect of Dead Petz: it feels like it was built to disintegrate.