Miley Cyrus - Younger Now
The Guardian 60
(RCA)
‘No one stays the same,” sings Miley Cyrus on the excellent title track of her sixth studio album, surely referring to a career of reinventions from Disney child star to Wrecking Ball-era sledgehammer-licking controversies to Dead Petz’s psychedelic weirdness. On Younger Now, she has taken control of the songwriting and production and emerges as a conservative, big-lunged, country-tinged pop star with songs about breaking free.
In Malibu, she mourns the loss of an ordinary childhood (“I never came to the beach or stood by the ocean”), while Miss You So Much seems to take a sly pop at the music industry (“You can drink my blood”). Elsewhere, there are teary anthems; Rainbowland pairs her with her godmother, Dolly Parton, for a rumbustious Southern stomp; while the confessional I Would Die for You would fit on to Beth Orton’s Central Reservation. It’s all really rather lovely, although too soon to know whether this, finally, is the “real” Miley standing up.
Continue reading... Thu Sep 28 20:30:06 GMT 2017The Guardian 60
(RCA)
The pop provocateur plays safe on her new album, abandoning R&B in favour of country-pop
You almost feel sorry for pop divas. Their every move is sifted for significance by fans, haters and professional cultural scrutineers alike. Every gesture is loaded; every stylistic nuance is grist to some commentary, a process at whose sharp end Miley Cyrus finds herself, once again. Her latest album, Younger Now, finds the child star turned pop provocateur pivoting hard after two radically different long-form releases, 2013’s Bangerz (hard-partying R&B) and 2015’s Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz (stoned pop, given away free).
You can hear Younger Now one of two ways. It is either a pleasant country-tinged outing that reflects, tunefully, on Cyrus’s recent past, roping in her godmother, Dolly Parton, for a track called Rainbowland, in which they envision some sort of utopia that twangs (it is also the name of Cyrus’s recording studio). This is Cyrus au naturel, daughter of another country star, Billy Ray Cyrus, gimmick-free, #unfiltered. Alternatively, you can see Younger Now as pure white flight, a retrenchment into heartland Americana after unapologetically channelling R&B and the impression of being bulletproof.
Younger Now is the sound of Cyrus, or her record company, panicking and hitting “reset”
Continue reading... Sun Oct 01 08:00:12 GMT 2017Pitchfork 47
Bland production and weak songwriting hamstring the personalized nature of Younger Now, making it merely a suggestion of the kind of artist Miley Cyrus could be.
Fri Sep 29 05:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 30
Miley Cyrus
Younger Now
[RCA; 2017]
Rating: 1.5/5
“NOBODY’S PERFECT”
Younger Now, the sixth studio release from Miley Cyrus, is a remarkably joyless affair for a country-pop record released in 2017. To be sure and fair, hints of heats haunt the steamrolled seams: past lives and loves swamping together on the title track, some charcoal smoke from the extinguished bad mood fire of “Love Someone,” and an inching biographic ache whittling vocal folds on “Week Without You.” But no song lingers long on listening ears when unobtrusion is the studio mandate. Younger Now, apology-pop polished to the point of septic sheen, is an impression of a projection. Tragically and damningly, Younger Now is boring.
Younger Now, the sound of the Pinocchio artifact come to life intent and immediately consumed with selling itself for firewood slavery, reboots the Miley Cyrus mythology into the near and non-existent past, self-revision to the point of denying an existence ever happened. It’s a record of retro-retroism, wanting a never-happened thing. Younger Now is a 42-minute revision to what Miley Cyrus might mean to you and me and whoever’s buying, an appeal to every minivan or polo shirt that might have felt unappealed and appalled at the tongue-out career twerk swerve of the artist formerly never Miley Cyrus. There’s that charcoal voice, that almost Hannah Montana twinned thing promising “Feels like I just woke up/ Like all this time I’ve been asleep,” effectively reducing every past urge to an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland dismissal before immediately maintaining, “Even though it’s not who I am/ I’m not afraid of who I used to be.” Self-denying reparation and unapologetic platitude, coupled in the same moment as steeping newspeak, smack of nostalgia for no-thing, real-time revision. As marketing rollout as record producer, the new neon bible to swear by, Younger Now is a hookless, joyless, profitable success, the plod of…
“YOU LIVE AND YOU LEARN IT”
…“She’s Not Him,” where the singer reduces her (still and always, admittedly) moving quake of a voice to a shake and a quiver, an admission of, “I just can’t fall in love with you” to a former girlfriend “’cause you’re not him.” It’s phrased like a lament, a wish for requiting, but the song is quick to point out how legitimate the romance was (“You changed my life/ You’ve been my world”) and quicker still to mandate that it must be biologically impossible: “And maybe it’s beyond my control/ Some sort of chemical reaction.” Mid-song, it’s evident that the sweeping saccharine strings are there to mask the fact that “She’s Not Him” is like the musical equivalent of “it’s just a phase,” the cultural artifact chasing purity, depositing toxins as sugar pills in our radio landscape.
The songs on Younger Now do not entertain engagement as a viable way forward. Younger Now has no viable plan for the future. There’s the insta-tepid microwaved-Nashville fart-breeze “Malibu,” Miley realizing the wrongs her strong wills have urged her to (“Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning/ And you’re there to save me”) and returning to her estranged (heterosexual) betrothed, re-avowwing normative systems and obedient reason in the locked-room G-rating of a Malibu mansion, “Free as birds catching the wind.” It’s a listless impression of 1970s country-pop, unseasoned electric guitar flat on pacifying handclap. It’s nostalgia formally, adult contemporary that can’t bear to be in the present moment or do anything but look back to oblivion. Damnably, it’s nostalgia psychologically, too, for an innocence and staidness absent from the Miley mythology until now. Rendered as maximally low stakes, nostalgia hijacks songs, as bad memories reconstruct rather than realize: “Change is a thing you can count on/ I feel so much younger now.”
Younger Now stings because it’s an unmoved object acting on behalf of oppressive forces, like adherence to and conserving personal capital, bangerz ">VMAs reparations and personality recall rendered in the plodding time of bad ballads like “I Would Die For You,” which is sucked clear of Prince kiss, a slick promise of self-annihilation for the profit of an unseen romantic partner, and “Inspired,” a paean to empty environmental woes and changes in platitudes, “Starting with the bees/ Or else they’re gonna die” and lifting up Papa Bear Billy Ray himself (“He somehow has a way of knowing what to say/ So when I’m feeling sad, he makes me feel inspired.”) Younger Now stings because it makes you feel sorry and a little ashamed for ever being a little too drunk on dirty-tap Bass in a New Brunswick bar and rapidly falling into desperate, sweaty connection with the stupid slam of “I never hit so haaard in love” because…
“AGAIN AND AGAIN…”
…there are stories in the symbols of our pop music, meaning for our lives in the moving bones of our kaleidoscopic national icons. Miley Cyrus apparated into our national dreamscape as the squeaked-clean product, at the whim of gargantuan paternities, fathers both biological and Disney-brand that seemed to only want to convert the kid with natural star-stuff to moral profit. In an obsessively scrutinized turn of pop events (similar to the trajectory inflected on Britney and Mariah and every other American historical symbology), Miley Cyrus rejected the sheen of clean and profited from and by masters and brand keepers. Young, dumb, and ugly, she set out on a numbskull odyssey, tongue-out arms-out happy hippie charity shit-talking and taking it back, taking it forward. Not every song banged on Bangerz, and plenty of that glimmer was put on ungold, but some of those glitzed neons asserted existence and joy in the face of profit-seeking and the unfeeling things that seem to run our worlds. Set fire to your circulation royalties because “Money ain’t nothing but money,” croak-crooned that Appalachian-smoke voice, dismissing capital for what it is and asserting home by way of wildernesses traversed (country music) and the way forward via plastic existence (pop music). In the hotdog hallucinations and so-dumb day-glo psychosillyness of Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Pets, the icon found music for no ears in something like the illegibility of culture. If reality moved on you devoid of your whim, shout and celebrate. “If love be rough with you, be rough with love.” All I wanted was to break your walls.
Younger Now arrives in a historical moment where realities swerve faster and capping non-pasts are sold harder and more desperately than ever before. It is a country-pop record unfortunately uninterested in being a country-pop record when country and pop, in 2017 and before, are two of our best imagined (but not unreal) solutions to the real problems in the sway and wave of history. Country is nomad circuital, leaving homes and wombs only to return a little transformed /a>. Pop is the promise of plasticity, a relentless way forward, moving together with other bodies. Younger Now also arrives in a historical moment when the rhizomes of popular music keep colliding with Harvests and Manchesters and Bataclans and Harvests. Now, in a now, we look to every voice for a way forward because staying here is inches of suicide.
The singer’s voice on Younger Now is a supple kind of smoke, a thing coming down the mountains into the towns where we make our lives. In this instance, on these songs, it misguides itself and we lose the strain it once sang “Nobody’s perfect/ You live and you learn it/ And if I mess it up sometimes…” The ellipsis plots a way past now. Younger Now, for all its failings, isn’t the definitive statement from Miley Cyrus, because it won’t be the last; as a collection of country-pop songs, it presents a moment of reflection, our history remembering forward, what matters to us and what we take from and into this world. Without the country and the pop and the voices, we wouldn’t dance, wouldn’t kiss, wouldn’t listen. Any way forward isn’t shrinking retreat. Nobody’s perfect, wrecking balls all. “Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.” It’s our house. We can love who we want to. We just have to want to.
Drowned In Sound 30
It is testament to Miley Cyrus’ sheer force of character that she has entered into this latest act in a recent career defined by shape-shifting with apparent seamlessness. As much as she is by no stretch of the imagination the first child star to adopt a deliberately risqué persona in order to put clear blue water between her adult self and her squeaky-clean past, Cyrus did it with an approach that was at best scattergun and at worst, gratuitous in its scandal-making - twerking on twice-her-age rape culture apologist Robin Thicke at the MTV VMAs, appearing nude in the video for ‘Wrecking Ball’ in a move she’s already voiced regret over, and developing a curious propensity for tongue protraction that Gene Simmons would be proud of.
There was also her dalliance with The Flaming Lips, born of a friendship with Wayne Coyne and culminating in Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz, an awkward 23-track tribute of sorts to the band that heavily featured its members and ultimately came across as a pretty hollow hodgepodge of all the things that Cyrus thought, superficially, ought to make a good Flaming Lips record, seemingly forgetting that their greatest abilities have always been in melody, atmosphere and production. Cyrus’ involvement with the group puzzled the alternative music world but, in truth, there didn’t seem to be any more to it than the explanation Coyne once gave when asked why the actress Heather Graham had been spotted at one of their shows: 'I guess because she takes a lot of drugs and listens to music - isn’t that how we get all our Flaming Lips fans?'
Most artists who had removed themselves quite so dramatically from the family-friendliness with which they made their name probably would have been laughed out of the proverbial room if they’d released as their comeback single a love song as straightforward and bereft of anything potentially controversial as ‘Malibu’, as Cyrus did back in May. In the event, though, it was fairly well-received, and there was perhaps a sense that her genuinely impressive vocals had taken a back seat to the circus that the Bangerz era became. This was not least because flashes of it were starting to emerge again; her powerhouse take on ‘Silent Night’ was the highlight of Bill Murray’s admittedly rubbish Netflix special A Very Murray Christmas, and her appearance at June’s One Love Manchester concert went down well, too.
Plus, the reversion to the country-pop climes of her earlier career on Younger Now should play to the strengths that she showcased in a series of YouTube cover videos in 2012, The Backyard Sessions, which demonstrated not just that her voice suits the likes of ‘Jolene’ and ‘Lilac Wine’, but in fact that she is obviously genuinely steeped in the country tradition. You wonder, incidentally, whether or not the fact that this particular genre is popular primarily with the more puritanical side of America’s population lent extra venom to the backlash when she left it behind to chase outrage.
It is within this framework that Cyrus’ best work is likely to materialise in future. It is not, however, manifested in Younger Now. This is a thumpingly disappointing and consistently milquetoast set of songs riddled with lyrical banality, done-to-death melodies and wispily thin production. The old-timey guitars and record-player scratchiness that precede the opening title track are promising, if affected, but they quickly give way to garish chart-pop. There’s a decent folk-pop ode to separation anxiety buried somewhere within ‘Week Without You’, but you’d have to get past the clanging effects laid over the guitars and vocals first.
On the back half of the record, Cyrus dramatically cedes ground to current pop trends; ‘Bad Mood’ comes with a thumping beat and a style of delivery that leans closer to R&B than anything else, and the same can be said for ‘Love Someone’ and ‘Thinkin’, which are glossed over with an incredibly slight coat of standard-issue country gloss but otherwise seem like an enormous concession to the fans that Cyrus picked up with Bangerz, even if they are considerably more demure in their lyrical outlook. You certainly can’t imagine her hero, Dolly Parton, trying her hand at that sort of thing, and when she does show up on the album, on ‘Rainbowland’, it’s much closer to the sort of trad-country fare that would have served Cyrus best if she’d adopted it throughout; still, though, the noisy, cluttered production hampers it.
Unsurprisingly, Younger Now’s standouts are the tracks that give Cyrus’ voice the biggest platform, ‘I Would Die for You’ and ‘Inspired’. Neither are earth-shattering, but the latter in particular has the rich country feel that the album as a whole sorely lacks, and when you hear her vocally soar as she does there, you realise what a genuine crime it is that her talents have been utterly squandered on the rest of the record. The artwork for Younger Now harks back to classic country artwork of the Sixties, and it’s a strong contender for the year’s most misleading artwork - this is not a country LP, but instead commercial thin gruel that barely masquerades as something more befitting the genre that Cyrus cut her teeth on. The death of Tom Petty three days after its release saw her deliver a gorgeous rendition of ‘Wildflowers’ with her dad on The Tonight Show - providing further proof that she can be really very good at this when she wants to be, and making Younger Now’s profligacy all the more baffling, but no less frustrating.
Mon Oct 16 13:12:25 GMT 2017