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Post by Admin on May 29, 2020 22:11:57 GMT
While Gaga has occasionally welcomed other artists into her world, Chromatica features one of the more extensive guest lists among her albums. “Rain on Me,” a show-stopping duet with her sister in pasta and pain, Ariana Grande, makes emotional catharsis feel effortless. K-pop girl group BLACKPINK joins her on the less-appealing “Sour Candy,” which also samples the modern deep-house classic “What They Say” (as previously heard on Nicki Minaj’s “Truffle Butter” and recalled on Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish”). And Gaga reunites with close friend and mentor Elton John on “Sine From Above,” where the kooky kindred spirits bring their stadium-sized voices to big-tent EDM. The Sound Last week, Gaga shared a seven-hour “Welcome to Chromatica” playlist full of house, hi-NRG, and techno bangers (which she’s since replaced with the album). It sent a clear message: Chromatica wants—no, needs—you to dance. Executive produced by Gaga and BloodPop® (who worked on Joanne), the album evokes Gaga’s disco-stick days of yore with pulsating house anthems, bubblegum hooks, and frantic electropop synths. She enlisted an arsenal of dance-pop and EDM producers (including Axwell, Skrillex, BURNS), and divided the album into three sections separated by brief, dramatic instrumentals. The final track, “Babylon,” is a dead ringer for Madonna circa “Vogue.” It also samples a loon! Still Far From the Shallow While Gaga has long represented empowerment in pop, she often acknowledges that healing can be an uphill battle, especially when faced with physical or emotional trauma. Several songs on Chromatica seem to address her ongoing struggles with depression and PTSD. “My biggest enemy is me, ever since day one,” she sings, almost robotically, in the chorus of “911.” “Every single day, I dig a grave/Then I sit inside it, wondering if I’ll behave,” she coos on the booming “Replay.” But Gaga loves a triumph-over-hardship narrative, which Chromatica offers on songs like “Rain on Me,” “Plastic Doll,” and “Free Woman.” While the record often sounds like a cooler, clubbier take on early Gaga, the vulnerability in her new songs raises the stakes.
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Post by Admin on Jun 4, 2020 6:45:59 GMT
Lady Gaga’s return to dance music was supposed to be spectacular. For years, since 2013's critically maligned ARTPOP, Gaga, at least on the surface, was shapeshifting into a more restrained, ultra-serious pop star. She recorded a jazz album with Tony Bennett, she threw on a hat and grabbed an acoustic guitar for Joanne, she made a bid for an Oscar-worthy acting career with the deeply earnest A Star Is Born. Of course, all along Gaga was still Gaga-ing, even if she was no longer rolling up to red carpets encased in an egg, like something out of Spinal Tap. Gaga was still building out her camp pastiche brick by brick, like a Jenga tower held together by overwrought Oscar performances and piano ballads. But when she released “Stupid Love,” a punchy dance song with a Star Trek-inspired video—her hair, a Pepto Bismol-pink wig—the song felt like an ecstatic return to form: here was Gaga not overthinking it, reveling in the simplicity of feel-good synth-pop, having fun. Chromatica, Gaga’s sixth album, keeps with that simplicity. It’s a dance record through and through, though one with an intimate, emotional core as she tackles her anxiety head-on throughout. “You love the paparazzi, love the fame,” Gaga sings on “Fun Tonight” about the discrepancy between her happy party music and her real feelings. “Even though you know it causes me pain.” But there’s also lightness: the nu-disco sparkle of “Replay” and “Rain On Me” featuring Ariana Grande call to mind Kylie Minogue’s Fever. “Babylon,” the album’s cheeky closer, is molded in the image of Madonna’s “Vogue” as Gaga speak-sings about gossiping “B.C.” style. “Babble on,” she sings. For fans, that Chromatica is a fun return to the dancefloor Gaga of yore might be enough to celebrate. But for someone at this point in her career who has constantly shifted her sound and style in so many ways, I can’t help thinking she has much better, and frankly much bigger, music in her. As much as Chromatica was positioned as Gaga’s dramatic return to dance music, the music itself is surprisingly muted. The album sometimes rolls with a festival-ready deep house sound, particularly on songs (“Free Woman,” “Sine From Above”) that call to mind producers and DJs like Kygo and Jonas Blue, whose EDM popularity peak was years ago. The robotic “911,” which has Gaga deadpan-singing about popping pills to rid the enemy that is herself, sounds like something she’d release in 2010, albeit with half the bite of a track like “Just Dance.”
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Post by Admin on Jun 4, 2020 19:11:34 GMT
If Chromatica feels lackluster, it’s not entirely Gaga’s fault. She lives for the applause that comes with heavy promotion; touring gimmicks, incredible live television performances, outfits snapped by paparazzi. Listening to “Sour Candy,” featuring BLACKPINK, who body every music video they make, I wondered if the song’s uninspired Maya Jane Coles-biting (aka “Truffle Butter”) beat would have been forgiven with the help of a moment-making music video. But amidst covid-19, which initially made Gaga push back Chromatica’s release, she doesn’t necessarily have all the accessories that can turn a Gaga release into the spectacle she’s known for.
But it’s not just the moment and Gaga’s hindered promotion that keeps Chromatica feeling restrained. Gaga, like so many pop stars before her, has moved through her career in distinct musical phases, and Chromatica is no exception. It has such a unified sound and style, but perhaps to its detriment. When I think about pop music that pushes the genre forward, it comes from artists who are willing to take risks in the studio. Think of Beyoncé, who listens to songwriters and producers like Rae Sremmurd, Ezra Koenig, and Caroline Polachek when assembling her albums, or Rihanna who was derided for Anti lacking a point of view but was filled to the brim with songs that were islands onto themselves; who cares if “Love On the Brain” didn’t make sense on the same album as “Kiss It Better?” Ariana Grande’s best song in years, “thank u, next” was honed by writers Tayla Parx and Victoria Monét, two relative newcomers her own age.
Gaga doesn’t assemble albums a la carte, and I wouldn’t expect her to; she creates distinct mini-worlds and lives in them for a whole cycle. But that’s the old school way, one still clinging to a time when people listened to an entire album front to back, which Gaga hopes you’ll do even if the record is divided into three sections. I wonder why she isn’t taking bigger risks, expanding her collaborative circle, and looking beyond producers like BloodPop, who produced almost all of Chromatica, for an album that purports to celebrate dance music. If anyone has the bandwidth to get a lot weirder, it’s Gaga.
But maybe Chromatica wasn’t the release for her to let her freak flag fly even higher. Chromatica doesn’t break ground for pop or Gaga. Instead it plays like a cleaning up of Gaga’s musical slate, bringing her back into the folds of club music and the bubblegum fun that launched her career, a creative release that sounds like one long exhale.
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Post by Admin on Jun 5, 2020 7:04:19 GMT
Lady Gaga is set for her sixth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, according to industry forecasters. Prognosticators suggest the music superstar's latest effort, Chromatica, could launch atop next week’s tally with over 250,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending June 4. Chromatica was released on May 29 via Interscope Records and led by the singles "Stupid Love" and "Rain On Me," with Ariana Grande. The former debuted and peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, and the latter opened at No. 1 on the chart date June 6. The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week based on multi-metric consumption, which comprises traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The top 10 of the June 13-dated Billboard 200 chart (where Chromatica may debut at No. 1) is scheduled to be revealed on Billboard’s website on Sunday, June 7. If Chromatica starts with 250,000 units, it would stand among the top five biggest weeks of 2020 for an album. So far, the only larger weeks were earned by the debut frames of The Weeknd’s After Hours (444,000 units earned, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data), BTS’ Map of the Soul: 7 (422,000), Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake (288,000) and Gaga’s Interscope labelmate Eminem, with Music to Be Murdered By (279,000). Of Chromatica’s possible 250,000-plus units, album sales may comprise 200,000, with most of the rest generated by streaming activity. Chromatica will benefit from sturdy sales via retailers like iTunes, Amazon and Target (which carries an exclusive deluxe edition of the album on CD). In addition, Chromatica is hauling in sales from dozens of merchandise/album bundles sold via her official webstore, and a concert ticket/album sale offer with her three upcoming U.S. stadium shows scheduled for August.
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Post by Admin on Jun 6, 2020 6:36:23 GMT
Lady Gaga lands the biggest opening week for any artist on the U.K. album chart in 2020 as Chromatica (Interscope/Universal) debuts at No. 1.
Chromatica records 53,000 combined units to become her fourth U.K. No. 1 album. The Official Charts Company reports that Gaga outdoes the first-week tallies of her Cheek By Cheek collaboration with Tony Bennett in 2014, Joanne in 2016 and the cast recording of A Star Is Born (2018).
The new album outperforms the rest of this week's top ten combined, and delivers 8,500 sales on vinyl. Three of its tracks are in the singles top 40: last week's No. 1 collaboration with Ariana Grande, "Rain On Me," now at No. 2; "Sour Candy" with Blackpink at No. 17 and "Alice" at No. 29.
There's little movement in the rest of the top five of the album survey, with KSI's Dissimulation, Lewis Capaldi's Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent (EMI/Universal) and Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia (Warner Records) all steady at Nos. 2, 3 and 4 respectively. Harry Styles' Fine Line (Columbia/Sony), which has spent its entire 25-week chart span in the top ten, climbs back 6-5.
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