But what those first three names, Idol, Jett, and Nicks, bring to the table is a rock and roll edge and power that Cyrus’ pop fans might not otherwise be all-in on. I mentioned the guest appearances on the album already, and they’re a lot of fun. Personally, if I’m not starting at the top of the tracklist (which I do recommend), I’m starting with Midnight Sky. So when I hit play and listened… I was happy, and maybe not surprised, and maybe not relieved, but satisfied and smiling. I wanted it to be awesome, but you can’t always get what you want. I fully admit that I was exciting going into this album. This really is a release packed with extras and wow moments. And, on Apple Music, there are four additional bonus tracks, with Backyard Sessions of High, Plastic Hearts, Golden G String, and Angels Like You. It’s got appearances by legends Billy Idol, Joan Jett, and Stevie Nicks as well as 6-time 2021 GRAMMY nominee, Dua Lipa. Plastic Hearts is a 12-song album, stretched into a 15-song album thanks to a remix and two live covers. The evolution and opportunities and chances and risks and rewards and hits are all equally as exciting when it comes to seemingly every step she takes in her career now. She can make country albums galore when she actually is a hard bitten 50-year-old in the meantime if her mercurial muse is telling her to make big-hair-and-rolled-up-jacket-sleeves music, then even if it’s more hit and miss than her last record, the aesthetic is perfectly realised, and she remains without question A Good Thing.Miley Cyrus’s journey from dual-identitied child star to grown woman making her own artistic decisions may never be complete, and that’s okay by me. There’s plenty of drama, the lyrics have real teeth, “Night Crawling” with Idol is a fantastic bit of goth disco Lost Boys sleaze, and there are no stinkers, as such.īut the Eighties-ness of it does sound kind of mannered, and the Ronson-produced “High” – which is the furthest from Simpson / Bruckheimer-type movie soundtracks and the closest to straight up country – is a breath of fresh air in the middle still dramatic but less archly so. The reverbs are big, the sounds are slick, the big single “Midnight Sky” seemingly deliberately references both Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” and Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”, and as if that wasn’t enough both Billy Idol and Joan Jett add guest vocals to really hammer home what the aesthetic is. This time round she’s shifted again: the theme here is the mid Eighties new wave / soft rock interface. And 2018’s Fleetwood-Mac-go-disco Mark Ronson collaboration “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” was easily her best single to date. Thus her last album, 2017’s heavily country rock-leaning Younger Now, was by far her most consistent (and, incidentally, an infinitely more convincing pivot to rootsiness than Taylor Swift’s recent Pitchfork bait). Even in her teens she had the singing voice of a hard-living, hard-working, roadhouse-touring, bourbon swilling four times divorced 50-year-old, and she’s steadily grown into that voice as she’s dialled down her tendency for athletic showboating and pursuit of ludicrous rave intensity. That said, relative maturity seems to suit her. And while there have been gems at each stage of her career, there have also been quite a few hot messes along the way. Over her six previous albums, she’s swerved through bubblegum pop, EDM, trap, Broadway showstoppers, raging dubstep, faux-lo-fi psychedelic chillwave (with The Flaming Lips in tow), straight country, and the rest.
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