Despite selling almost as much as its predecessor, her new Artpop is widely accounted a failure, in part because her social-media army got beat back by Katy Perry's social-media army but also because critical reaction has been clueless. The album hasn't just been berated by online rockcrit's ever-shifting gaggle of dunderheads crying "insincerity" and claiming she's boring because they're bored, but misread by pros as pop-savvy as Jon Pareles, Maura Johnston, and Mikael Wood. Well rationalized or not, I deduced that the pans were more of the old what-have-you-done-for-me-lately once I realized that after spinning the album casually for a week I perked up every time "Aura" and "G.U.Y." and "Manicure" and "Swine" came around again. Maybe it's just my Skrillex problem-since unlike the young I'm never bombarded by EDM synths at medically inadvisable volumes, this was not only the rawk album of the year for me, it sounded fresh. Really, who needs guitars?
Despite selling almost as much as its predecessor, her new Artpop is widely accounted a failure, in part because her social-media army got beat back by Katy Perry's social-media army but also because critical reaction has been clueless. The album hasn't just been berated by online rockcrit's ever-shifting gaggle of dunderheads crying "insincerity" and claiming she's boring because they're bored, but misread by pros as pop-savvy as Jon Pareles, Maura Johnston, and Mikael Wood. Well rationalized or not, I deduced that the pans were more of the old what-have-you-done-for-me-lately once I realized that after spinning the album casually for a week I perked up every time "Aura" and "G.U.Y." and "Manicure" and "Swine" came around again. Maybe it's just my Skrillex problem-since unlike the young I'm never bombarded by EDM synths at medically inadvisable volumes, this was not only the rawk album of the year for me, it sounded fresh. Really, who needs guitars?