At 92 minutes, the new Miley Cyrus album is really long, a double album by old-school standards that’ll take up more of your time than a Serena Williams tennis match. (Although not as long as the Cyrus-hosted MTV Video Music Awards, thank God.) And for sure, the 23-song set — featuring 14 in collaboration with psychedelic popsters Wayne Coyne &the Flaming Lips, and a bunch more involving Bangerz producer Mike Will Made It — does contain its share of indulgent stretches, most of which involve the 22-year-old former Hannah Montana going on about how drunk, high, and horny she is.
Announced out of the blue at the recent VMA show, the album is available as a free streaming download at www.mileycyrus.com/andherdeadpetz. So “Dead Petz” is free from any pressure to please the pop marketplace. Yet the album is still, even at its most willfully experimental, far from the formless affair you might expect. In fact, there’s plenty of compelling music, starting with “Karen Don’t Be Sad,” a full-of-feeling ballad that would have been right at home on a prime Flaming Lips album like “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.” There are gurgling electro-jams such as the spooky “Evil Is But a Shadow” and weird martial eco-anthems like “1 Sun,” not to mention oddly moving songs to dead pets Floyd the dog and Pablow the blowfish. Yes, this is the anti-pop, let-it-all-hang-out Miley. But the former child star and showbiz vet can’t be entirely uncommercial, no matter how hard she tries — even when she speaks the truth in singing, as she does on “Slab of Butter (Scorpion)”: “The only laws I obey are the ones I’m makin’ myself.”
— Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer
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