This weekend a tweet lamenting that not even reviews were being written about Miley Cyrus’s new album went viral, invoking some kind of “weird industry boycott.” Another way to see it is that music critics are running out of fresh things to say about her career. Bass Persuades, her tenth album, is another entry in the same line: she can conjure up hit songs as easily as she struggles to build an album with a through-line. How long will we have to wait for “the great Miley Cyrus album”?
The performer behind “Flowers” is a restless figure, and the messages and sounds on this album are varied. Bass Persuades worries that “the guys nowadays don’t dance” and are more glued to their phones. To develop such an idea, the music draws on the 80s influences of Eurythmics and the Human League, while its video nods toward Lady Gaga.
The new exploration of love carries substantial weight in a track with echoes of Fleetwood Mac and 60s film-soundtrack vibes like “Let’s Get Married,” and the ambient piano ballad “Orbit,” which captures how she feels when she’s in love. But then, for some reason, she turns to the rawest, most aggressive sounds of her life, delivered with the help of the underground queer group Model/Actriz.
The binary of “pop stars” versus “underground artist” has yielded standout albums for artists like Beyoncé (with James Blake, Chairlift) or Madonna (Orbit, Mirwais), but also disappointments such as Christina Aguilera’s Bionic, or misunderstood works like Katy Perry’s Witness. Going underground isn’t inherently good or bad. Unfortunately, this album leans much more toward the latter. “Different Religion” fails to be a highlight either creatively or emotionally, and above all it doesn’t fit well before “Let’s Get Married” and “Orbit.”
A frequent problem with Bass Persuades is that it contains “good ideas, poorly arranged” moments. “REDLIGHTS” is a curious quasi-religious recording in the vein of Simon & Garfunkel, almost as pure as an ABBA melody… which is followed by a sensual duet in the Gainsbourg mold, “Neon Signs,” with Andrew Wyatt… and then another industrially tinged piece, “Innocent Ways.”
The most obvious example of both the good and the bad on this album would be “Aftermath.” Miley conceived it as a “Thom Yorke-style ballad” for her partner Maxx Morando, who has co-written and co-produced some tracks, but he found it “boring,” so they transformed it into this trance-tinged track that juxtaposes the positives with the negatives (“you were mine / you were never mine”), leaving a bittersweet aftertaste, for better or for worse. It could have made a powerful closing track given its cathartic potential, but halfway through it neither allows the previous ballads to breathe nor the forthcoming bangers to land. It fuels the desire to assemble an alternate tracklist for all this, and we’re only talking about nine new songs. Couldn’t they have crafted it with more care?
On one occasion, Miley participated in a parody of “When Harry Met Sally,” one of the great American comedies from the 1990s. One of the most memorable lines written by the late Nora Ephron is that “everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor, but not everyone can have both.” Disc after disc, Miley Cyrus has shown she has plenty of the latter, but not quite as much of the former.
