Album Review: Born This Way by Lady Gaga

Back in November I reviewed an album that was a collection of music in the dubstep genre.  If you took the time then to go and listen to the album you would notice that Lady Gaga has tapped into the dubstep sound for the backdrop of her latest album. 

Gaga is an odd artist for such grand success and everyone has been curious to see where she would go with her next album.  Would she turn more mainstream or more extreme.  She has tried in an odd way to walk the fence on this question.  She has completely thrown out the dance pop sound that made her such a smash and has turned to four sounds to create this new album. 

As I've often talked about there is a lot of music now looking back to the 80's for influence.  Most of it is pulling from either U2/R.E.M. or post-punk, Gaga has gone to the end of the 80's and is pulling specifically from Madonna's Like a Prayer.  This is then blended with Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell.  That gets us the basic melody and construct of the songs.  That is then layered on top of straight out of the 90's Eurotrash dance beats which is blended with the modern underground dubstep sound. 

All in all it creates a very odd sound, certainly not mainstream, and though it has its moments overall it fails as a sound that can survive over 14 tracks.  The dance beats get very tiring by the fourth track and though the dubstep sound adds a nice modern touch it is so on the edge of the music that it fails to add enough spice to get past the relentless beats. 

But that's just the backdrop.  The real issue here is the Bat Out of Hell take on Like a Prayer.  For me it just doesn't work.  Of course I've never been a big fan of Bat Out of Hell so maybe that's part of the issue. 

I won't even get into the lyrical content except to say Gaga is much more effective at creating an angry love song than at creating an anthemic tune about Hair. 

All in all I don't think the album works though I would like to hear her go further down the dubstep road and use its dirty sound to help accentuate her angry love songs which she's so good at writing.  The album is way too long at 14 tracks and could see it easily cut to eight to ten tracks. 

There are some good workout songs on here, but that's about it which is a big disappointment for me as I really liked some of her earlier stuff. 

Following the Rhapsody rating method I give it 2 out of 5 stars for Not Bad.