‘Bass Persuades’ by Miley
★★
At 33, Miley Cyrus is “still finding her way forward,” said Larisha Paul in Rolling Stone. On her latest No. 1 album, the former teen star attempts a couple of club tracks like the hits she used to make, but it’s clear she “has no use for flash and spectacle” and would rather just talk about her fiancé, musician and producer Maxx Morando. While the dance-oriented “Bass Persuades” proves to be “a rambling lead single with little to say,” Miley—if we use the mononym she now prefers—sounds fully committed on the “aching” ballad “Orbit,” the lighthearted “Let’s Get Married,” and the record’s other tributes to romantic devotion. For this restless star, it’s “an unusually focused set,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Over the years, Miley has achieved “highly mixed results” by “zigzagging among ’80s rock, folk-pop, dream-pop, and R&B.” Here, she limits herself to electronic pop, but after opening with three “decent-togood” tracks, “almost everything that follows is forgettable.” Too often, the others “fall into an in-between space.” They are “not rhythmically interesting enough to make you want to move and don’t have the tunes to stand up as pop.
‘Ride Lonesome’ by Beck
★★★
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Beck’s first album in seven years is “cut from the same cloth” as two of his most acclaimed efforts, said Fred Thomas in AllMusic. Like 2002’s Sea Change and 2014’s Morning Phase, an album of the year winner, Ride Lonesome “glows with a beautiful, lush sadness,” creating “an atmosphere of deep, almost wounded introspection.” Recorded with the same producer and musicians Beck enlisted for those earlier records, this album’s 12 tracks rely almost wholly on acoustic instrumentation as they amble forward slowly, starting with a title track that’s “dusted with gorgeous wisps of pedal steel guitar.” But while Sea Change conveyed the raw despair Beck was feeling after a breakup, this album feels like an echo that treats melancholy as if it’s a genre. Fortunately, Ride Lonesome “never feels like a pale imitation,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Perhaps Beck, at 56 and no longer married, is simply experiencing “a very mid-50s kind of malaise.” In any case, he’s provided new evidence that his best music is “born out of misery.” Credit his level of craft. “Everything here is melodically exquisite; every song has the requisite emotional impact.”
