Member Since: 10/3/2010
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'Cheek to Cheek' - 64 Metascore
Cheek to Cheek - Lady Gaga & Tony Bennett
Lady Gaga & Tony Bennett | Interscope | Release Date: Sept 23, 2014
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Reviews
83 - Entertainment Weekly
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Why the pair wanted to make this album — for laughs, as a stunt — we may never know. But if you come to Cheek to Cheek expecting a half-assed gag, the joke's on you.
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80 - New York Daily News
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Gaga has always been a power singer, but on her pop recordings she can sound monochromatic, shouting out lyrics like a carnival barker. Here, she uses her athletic skills for more varied and lustrous effect. She has a blast bending the notes in the Gershwins’ “They All Laughed” or running the scales with madcap abandon in Coleman’s “Firefly.” Her tone resounds like never before.
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80 - The Guardian
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But it’s Gaga who will benefit most from this album, which has the pair finding joyous common ground as they swing through 11 standards. She has been musically hamstrung by the common assumption that her talent begins and ends with the Auto-Tune switch; Cheek to Cheek reveals the considerable warmth and depth of her voice.
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Postive - Chicago Tribune
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No doubt Lady Gaga takes her biggest risk of the venture singing solo in Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life," one of the most revered and demanding ballads in the jazz repertoire. Some listeners might find her reading hyper-emotional, and indeed she lavishes too much vibrato on select notes. But she clearly has studied the dramatic structure of the song and conveys it eloquently. Yes, there's a great deal of Ella Fitzgerald's gauzy sound in this "Lush Life" and elsewhere on the album. Yet there's also a gutsiness to Lady Gaga's interpretation, a willingness to lay emotions bare, that cannot be denied.
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Positive - Boston Globe
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This is the album for people who want to like Gaga, if only she would cut the crap and just sing. And that’s what she does here, rather beautifully and with a force that’s less Broadway showstopper and more liberated torch singer. She and Bennett bring out the best in each other.
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60 - The Telegraph
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If you take this album in the spirit of throwaway fun in which it seems to have been concocted, it is harmlessly engaging, although all of these tracks have been delivered more persuasively before, many of them by Bennett himself, whose voice is showing the inevitable creaks and strains of age. Ultimately, though, they don’t really sound like they are singing together so much as attacking the same songs from different perspectives.
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60 - All Music Guide
60 - Rolling Stone
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Lady Gaga's classical training has always been key to her origin story, so this album with 88-year-old crooner Tony Bennett is no big surprise. Gaga has real chemistry with Bennett (whom she befriended after they performed together at a benefit in 2011) on breezily swinging tunes like Cole Porter's "Anything Goes." Befitting a singer who harnessed vocal firepower on huge club tracks, she sometimes blasts away at these songs rather than relaxing into them. But on challenges like the subtle Billy Strayhorn ballad "Lush Life," the queen of the little monsters more than proves she can be a sophisticated lady too.
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60 - Billboard
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On Cheek to Cheek, Gaga justifies his faith -- sometimes a bit too forcibly. Whereas Bennett is a master of restraint -- a guy whose best performances play like melodic chat sessions -- Gaga thrives on spectacle. She sings many of these songs with the involuntary hamminess that fuels her flawed genius.
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40 - Slant Magazine
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It's the oldest trick in the book: Past-prime pop singer attempts to boost his or her relevance in the face of dwindling sales and hastily changing trends by commissioning the help of a hotter, more bankable artist. Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga's Cheek to Cheek is the latest product of such a collaboration—except I'm not referring to the octogenarian Bennett, who, after 60-plus years in the business, is selling more albums than ever before, but to Gaga, whose free-fall from the upper echelons of pop has been as precipitous as her rise was meteoric.
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25 - LA Times
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But talent for Lady Gaga has always been a means to an end, and on “Cheek to Cheek,” there is no end beyond cheap exploitation: of a bunch of important songs she brings nothing to; of an 88-year-old legend with whom she has zero chemistry; and, most dispiritingly, of our eagerness to follow her down an unlikely creative path.
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I'm so excited for this album.
