4 days ago
Miley Cyrus: Something Beautiful review – Like Bangerz without the bangers, or Flowers without the bloom
Something Beautiful
Artist
:
Miley Cyrus
Label
:
Columbia
As
Miley Cyrus
returns with her first album in two years, it is to a pop landscape defined by change. Taylor Swift's Eras tour has come and gone, and we've had both Charli XCX's Brat summer and 12 supercaffeinated months of Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso.
Those three artists offer a clear vision of themselves to the world: they are the very opposite of enigmatic. In the case of Cyrus, however, it's always been difficult to get a sense of what she is about, both as a person and as a musician. She is ubiquitous yet inscrutable, famous yet as blank as an empty space.
Her success can, even today, feel like a byproduct of the megafame she experienced as the teenage star of the Disney series Hannah Montana – an aftershock carrying into adulthood. (She is now 32.)
Cyrus has, it is true, clocked up hits by the bouquetful. Written in the aftermath of her divorce from the actor Liam Hemsworth, Flowers, her smash hit from 2023, has taken up its place in the modern pantheon of break-up bangers. The most-streamed single of that year, it was a tear-streaked victory lap that refused to retreat into the wings.
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Still, as a unified vision, there has always been a sense of Cyrus as a work in progress, a pop project yet to take its final form. We know that she is no longer the girl-next-door tweenager moulded by the Walt Disney Company – she has, after all, spent almost her entire grown-up life rejecting everything Hannah Montana represented (culminating with her most zeitgeisty LP, Bangerz, from 2013).
That has left a blank she has yet to fill. Take away the growing pains, the post-Disney angst, and who is Miley Cyrus?
That question is not answered by Something Beautiful, an ambitious yet patchy and underwhelming record that, much like Cyrus's public persona, has a huge, pulsating void at its centre. It confirms that Cyrus is still a cipher, as invisible as she is omnipresent, a point spelled out by the cover shot of the artist in shadow. All you can really see is the outline: she is the idea of a pop star rather than the reality.
Something Beautiful is a concept LP – several, in fact. Cyrus has described it as a 'visual album', and it will be followed by an accompanying movie to be released next month. (A polyp on her vocal cords prevents her from touring: the film is intended as the next best thing.) It is presented, moreover, as her gift to us, the needy masses; she has described it as containing 'healing sound properties' that would 'medicate somewhat of a sick culture through music'.
She has also revealed that the album was inspired by the Pink Floyd LP The Wall, Roger Waters's opus about alienation, paranoia and the unspeakable pain of being a member of the world's biggest prog band. Cyrus has never been a member of the world's biggest prog band – unless we count her collaborations with The Flaming Lips.
Either way, cut through the new-age-therapy blather and Something Beautiful is revealed to be a watery revisiting of her best work: Bangerz without the bangers, Flowers without the bloom.
There are flashes of pretension throughout. Opening with the grandiose Prelude, a spooling spoken-word piece, the album quickly segues into the anonymous soul-pop workout Something Beautiful, on which her husky voice is offset by a gentle saxophone.
But just when you think she's ditched the high-concept yoga-mat talk, she's back with End of the World, a serving of fluffy electronica driven by mantra-like lyrics ('Oh, I wanna take you to Nirvana, we can't take you too far').
Something Beautiful doesn't entirely miss the target: Easy Lover – nothing to do with Phil Collins, more's the pity – has a Grace Jones-like disco-apocalypse energy, while Golden Burning Sun is a trippy excursion into indie rock. (The LP's producer, Shawn Everett, has worked with The War and Drugs and Julian Casablancas.)
But there's lots of that goes wrong too: Walk of Fame sounds like X Factor Lady Gaga (not even the contribution of Alabama Shakes' Brittany Howard can help); and Every Girl You've Ever Loved is a saxophone solo desperately seeking a purpose in life (it also features a baffling spoken-word piece by Naomi Campbell). Far from channelling Pink Floyd, Cyrus's post-Flowers comeback is, in the end, largely colourless and lustreless.
