New album review: Lady Gaga sounds confused on stripped-down 'Joanne'

POP/ROCK

Lady Gaga, "Joanne" (Interscope)

For almost a decade, Lady Gaga has been assiduously arguing the case that the external is the internal, that performance is authentic, that flamboyance is ideology. Her career has been predicated on demolishing conventional ideas about what it might mean to play a character.

Though she was focused on the transformative powers of packaging, Gaga was always simply too focused a singer to be strictly defined by her presentation. At old concerts, when she belted songs at a piano, her future life as a Billy Joel or an Elton John seemed almost etched in stone. That means that her new album, the stripped-down "Joanne," isn't daring or radical — it's logical, a rejoinder to her past and also to the candy-striped pop that surrounds her.

But while "Joanne" is elemental, nothing about it is bare. Instead, it's confused, full of songs that feel like concepts in search of a home, small theater pieces extruded from imaginary productions and collected in one miscellany bin.

Most frustrating, it careens from high intensity to low, from one aesthetic to another, with lyrics that begin at trite and move somewhere quite dimmer. "Perfect Illusion," the chaotic first single, is a mélange of shouts, sounding like a demo with seams. "A-Yo" sounds like a Britney Spears parody or a song drawn from one of those live musicals on network television.

Lyrics that the Lady Gaga of old might have delivered with slyness — "Sinner's Prayer," or the political march of "Come to Mama" — feel unappealingly dogmatic here.

Even the best parts of "Joanne" — it has several strong moments — don't tell a coherent story. An impressive if not especially nuanced singer, Gaga sings with a stern, terse vibrato that codes seriousness but feels more like a simulacrum of feeling than the real thing.

Lady Gaga has arrived unadorned before, such as her duets with Tony Bennett or her "Sound of Music" tribute at the Oscars. Those moves, and "Joanne," too, serve as an overcorrection to the garish eccentricity of 2013's "Artpop," which flopped.

On "Joanne," Gaga fishes for inspiration, using a wide array of collaborations that strip those guests of their particular charms. Mark Ronson appears as a songwriter and producer, but there's precious little of his reliable funk. "Dancin' in Circles," co-written with Beck, sounds like a No Doubt demo. The Florence Welch duet "Hey Girl" sounds like Motown.

Even when Lady Gaga was at her pop peak, she wasn't quite at its center — she was a loud outsider summiting pop music by force of will and shock of glam. As a result, her music can seem like an old memory, not a recent one.

JON CARAMANICA, New York Times