PLASTIC HEARTS ALBUM REVIEW FREE
Last year, after reportedly stealing the show at a star-studded Chris Cornell tribute, she starred in a Black Mirror episode about a singer who breaks free from manufactured pop stardom and forms a rock band instead - a little on-the-nose, don’t you think? In her Backyard Sessions series, she has consistently delivered gritty acoustic takes on classic songs, like a run through the Replacements’ “Androgynous” joined by Joan Jett and Laura Jane Grace. In 2015 the former child star pivoted from the druggy trap-pop of Bangerz to Flaming Lips-assisted psychedelia with Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz, a pointedly weird album that, if not exactly devil-horn-throwing rock ‘n’ roll, at least stepped her into the rock milieu. Instead, it’s protecting our peace, staying in our lane, and buying yourself some damn flowers now and then because we deserve them.For a long time now, Miley Cyrus has seemed like she just wants to rock. “Drown me in your delight / Endless summer vacation / Make it last ’til we die,” she pleads in “Rose Colored Lenses”, suggesting that the real endless summer vacation for all of us is not the rave pop music purists have come to demand from Cyrus. I couldn’t believe that, and now I don’t have to because Endless Summer Vacation is that sense of calm that the singer has been struggling to relay for the better part of the last decade. Were we led to believe that Cyrus’ calm after the storm was actually Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz? But it never seemed to arrive, considering she also scrapped another pop album before Plastic Hearts.
When the singer released “Malibu” as the lead single from Younger Now in 2017, a sense of serenity and composure in her vocals and production set the stage for calm after the storm for Cyrus. Fittingly enough, the album is not only precisely what Cyrus’ discography and identity needed but perhaps what we as a culture need now. Indeed, the track was a taste of Endless Summer Vacation‘s unassuming quality, whose themes reflect coming of age, letting go of drama, and finding peace with oneself in the golden hour of the California sun. When the singer released the lead single from Endless Summer Vacation in January, “Flowers”, reactions in the pop music community were mixed since it wasn’t the rave soundtrack some were hoping for. How can we know who Miley Cyrus is as an adult if she keeps trying to be Dolly Parton or Joan Jett?Ĭyrus has gladly reversed the narrative on her latest record, whose name alone sounds like one could expect a dance-pop album that would impact mainstream airplay just in time to influence the summer charts. Instead, Cyrus decided to cling to trying on other people’s hats by releasing a Joan Jett-inspired glam rock album in 2020, Plastic Hearts, a record that put her talent on display but once again was unsuccessful at providing the singer with a distinct musical or cultural personality. But its result was a fumbled attempt at old-school country pop in the vein of her godmother, Dolly Parton, that didn’t land at all. The singer tried her best to remedy that with her next LP, Younger Now, an album that, based on its singles alone, should have softened Cyrus’ now-controversial public image and reminded the general public of her musical versatility.
But if twerking with Robin Thicke and licking sledgehammers helped us forget Hannah Montana, it also failed to establish Cyrus with any lasting sense of adult identity in pop music. The record is a clear and deliberate departure from the headline-generating pop that Cyrus had dedicated herself to making a decade ago, all in the name of shedding a Disney image that a misogynistic industry appeared hellbent on holding her to for the rest of her life. “And I got some baggage, let’s do some damage / I am not made for no horse and carriage,” she declares elsewhere. “I told myself I closed that door, but I’m right back here again,” sings Miley Cyrus on her eighth studio album, Endless Summer Vacation.
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