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Metacritic 58 (14 reviews) | Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz
METACRITIC 58
14 Reviews
Reviews that count toward MC:
EW: 91
Quote:
...Dead Petz is a remarkable accomplishment because Cyrus appears to have grasped all of her potential at once: there are Hot 100-ready sugar bombs, psychedelic departures, rugged rock, and throbbing alt-pop that immediately makes the year’s other best pop record (Carly Rae Jepsen’s excellent EMOTION) sound alarmingly obsolete.
Dead Petz offers an uncensored look at Miley Cyrus’ id and it’s a distillation of an artist’s soul that is both rare and wonderful, delivered so effortlessly off-the-cuff that it may occasionally sound haphazard. But there’s always an exacting method to her freewheeling madness—or, as she sings on the intoxicating album-closing piano ballad “Twinkle Song”: “I had a dream that I didn’t give a f—, but I give a f–.”
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NME: 80
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Though the production ranges from trippy to scuzzy and some tracks can sound like Miley Cyrus fronting The Flaming Lips, this doesn't feel like a contrived bid for credibility. Because there are moments that recall Cyrus's earlier work - '1 Sun' showcases her eco credentials like 2008's 'Wake Up America'; 'I Get So Scared' is a bluesy flipside to 'Bangerz' standout 'Adore You' - it simply feels like a wonderfully unexpected progression. 'Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz' is surely the weirdest album made by a massive pop star in recent memory, but more impressively, it's also an essential listen.
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Boston Globe: 80
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Her latest has a surplus of them [uniformly great songs]. It suggests Cyrus, at 22, has figured out how to present her views in a way that’s still powerful but also musically interesting and cohesive.
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Rolling Stone: 70
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Most of Dead Petz sounds pretty much like the Lips' latter-day output--she aims for Coyne-like high notes that don't suit her lowdown voice. But she scores wacko successes like "Milky Milky Milk," "Cyrus Skies" and "Slab of Butter (Scorpion)," along with cameos from Big Sean, Ariel Pink and producer Mike Will Made It.
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Billboard: 60
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Make no mistake, some of this album is unlistenable. The goofy interludes allow Cyrus to curse and declare that she is drunk, and little more. “Milky Milky Milk” sounds like it was recorded in an X-rated version of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, with wacky sound effects accompanying lines like “Your tongue milking me so hard/And from sucking on your nipples/Licking milky, milky stars.” There’s a semblance of a flow to the record’s sprawling track list, but too many songs sound hastily written, and too often Cyrus acts as if her drug trip is more poignant than the average freakout. It’s hard to fault Cyrus for throwing her most unhinged ideas into a deliberately bizarre, free album, but those thoughts are often uneasy to digest. But Cyrus is also too skilled of an artist to not place some beauty inside this madness, and Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz swerves into thoughtful territory when it’s least expected. In the first half of the record especially, the utilization of Coyne and co. produces some of the best Flaming Lips songs since 2009’s Embryonic: “Karen Don’t Be Sad” is an absolute stunner of a ballad, with Cyrus’ vocal delivery directly recalling Coyne’s gentle rasp over a spacey, acoustic-led arrangement. On “Tiger Dreams,” Ariel Pink stops by to help Cyrus put on her best Karen O costume, in a surprisingly effective art-rock display of emotional desperation.
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DIY Magazine: 60
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For the most it is a spaced-out, blissed-out trip that makes it hard to comprehend that it came from the mind behind Bangerz.
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Tiny Mix Tapes: 60
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As the “happy hippie” stumbles across the vacant lots of pop and non-pop, we’re left to wonder what psychedelia has and will mean for a generation practicing transcendence through its parallax lineage to 1960s resistance, one currently in media res with millennial nihilism. 20th-century psychedelia was a means to transform core values and belief systems through an experience defined by alterity, the trip being an escape from a world where ideology prevented vision. The trip could yield a potentially permanent transformation to the subject. That ideology still very much exists, but what happens when there were no core beliefs in the first place? What occurs when the already nebulous, fluid identity (one that Miley has recently embodied in fashion and in her own subversion of gender norms) liquifies further? If drugs and the iconography that often comes with it describe an unmistakable cartoon-ness, a psychological elasticity (defined as such only in opposition to the solidity of reality), what happens when disassociation, imperceptibility, and psychological alteration occur implicitly within culture?
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New York Daily News: 60
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Amid the stoned-out lyrics, and meandering segments, there’s a lot of creativity going on. While getting stoned may have served as the project’s main muse, some sober choices came into play. “Fweaky” boasts a soulful melody amid its kaleidoscope sonic swirl. “BB Talk” mixes an earnest melody into its wobbly spoken parts. Of course, as with many stoner episodes, there’s a warped notion of time at work. The album could use a hefty dose of editing, annoying to any listener - unless, of course, they’re too stoned to care.
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AV Club: 50
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Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz ends up a collection of fleeting engaging moments sandwiched between a slew of half-formed musical ideas.
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NY Times: 40
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Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is long and slack, stretching many of its 23 songs out of meager ideas, and puts raw faith in the weird or the nonvarnished, as if she had just recently discovered those concepts.
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LA Times: 40
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This album is not very good--and what makes it even worse is that it’s by Miley Cyrus.
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