The title track and first single from Miley Cyrus‘ “Bass Persuades” was a classic act of misdirection, we now learn. Released two and a half weeks prior to the album, the song promised a tenth album full of bangers (with an S or Z, take your pick), mildly scolding the young people for not being interested enough in the dance floor — whatsa matter with kids today? — and aiming to redirect them there with a combination of throbbing rhythms and spoken-word instructions loosely borrowed from the catalogs of Madonna and Lady Gaga. For better or worse, it seemed as if Cyrus was going to drop some of her stylistic eccentricities, along with her last name, and deliver a pure club record.
But that was our supposition, not hers, even if borrowing the single’s title for the whole project did seem to make a promise the full record isn’t prepared to deliver on. The new album, which came out Friday sans press previews, opens with “Bass Persuades” being followed by a second number in a faintly similar vein, “Different Religion,” but then it rarely returns to that territory until the 38-minute collection wraps up with its 10th track, a revved-up and unnecessary remix of the title track. What comes in between includes a surprising number of love ballads and a few odd outliers. It’s eclectic, but not “Endless Summer Vacation”-level eclectic. One thing no one will ever remember about it is the album having a surfeit of bass.
So how about persuasion? It’s a little light on that, too — pleasant, passable and occasionally compelling, but slight, with hooks that never quite reach the peaks you hope for out of a great pop song, and a bit of an “is that all there is?” feeling at the end of its relatively short length. It will be no one’s favorite Miley album, nor anyone’s least favorite. The overall feel is of something enjoyable on its own terms but a little undercooked in almost every regard, as if the star had been in a rush to deliver product to her new label, even as its primarily lovestruck lyrics — some of which are quite good — surely do reflect where the singer is at in her off-screen life. But for those who admired her previous album, the barely year-old “Something Beautiful,” for finding a cool and interesting retro aesthetic and pretty much sticking with it, “Bass Persuades” seems kind of centerless, more like an in-between project meant to mark time between bolder musical statements than any kind of arrival.
The core message of the album seems to be that things are going pretty well — make that extremely well — with fiancée Maxx Morando, who is a writer-producer collaborator on all but two of the tracks. Hearing Miley in a besotted state turns up mixed results. The third track, “Let’s Get Married,” is an abrupt left turn from the two bang-ier numbers that precede it into synthy easy listening/AC flavors, and what it delivers is not worth the whiplash; while it will probably be heard at some weddings to come, there may be a lot of attendees who would be itchy to please skip ahead to the vows.
Fortunately, that syrupy aside is a low point from which the album fairly quickly recovers. “Orbit,” next up, is just as romantic but one of the collection’s better tracks, as a power ballad — or even just ballad, without so much emphasis on the power — that applies some clever turns of phrase and thought to what could be a tired metaphor. Her significant other is the center of her solar system: “Place a marble on the floor / When you walk in the room, it’ll roll to you” is an image that makes for a lovely mash note.
The romantic reveries sometimes give way to things sillier and saucier. “Neon Signs” isn’t a particularly memorable tune unto itself, but the increasingly ridiculous spoken interactions between Cyrus and duet partner Andrew Wyatt may put a smile on your face before all is cooed and done. And/or make you cringe, since, as Wyatt murmurs at the end between the pair’s sexy bedroom oohs and aahs, “Some people think I’m creepy, but others think I’m just right.” An album this immersed in relatively straightforward love songs could use this moment of awkward verbal snogging.
The album’s best song, “Aftermath,” arrives halfway through, and as the one track that really accelerates into something more impassioned, it would have made an ideal climax for the record, if not for one problem: it’s the only sad song on the album, and thus would be a strange way to wrap up an otherwise cheerful collection. Still, it’s good to know that Miley can take a philosophical moment to ponder The End of All Things — including, inherently, her relationship — as a sort of intermission in an album that’s otherwise characterized by romantic buoyancy.
There is one other dark track on the album, sure to be its most talked-about number — “Innocent Ways,” which has Cyrus singing at length about a sibling, which many listeners will presume to be Noah. “I want better for my sister / She calls me only when it’s late night and she’s high / Her mind is spinning / Eight nights in a row / She’s been in a crisis / She looks just like me when she cries.” There needs to be some form of crisis to offer some dramatic tension in an album that doesn’t have much, so if she has to borrow the angst from a family member, fair enough. Amusingly, Miley seems to resent her sister for wearing a Blondie T-shirt without actually listening to Blondie music. More intriguingly, she sings, “Fall out from the fame / Claim my mother’s maiden name,” suggesting that this is a family that thinks a lot about last names and how to claim or ditch them. Besides just being legitimately lyrically fascinating, “Innocent Ways” is also the album’s most heated banger — and working out deep-rooted sibling issues over the din of the club is a concept we can get behind.
“Snow” ends the album on a sweeter, if relatively inconsequential-feeling, note, and ought to be the record’s closer, but then Miley evidently thought nine is not enough and makes it an even 10 with the remix of the title track no one asked for. Ending with the most obvious form of filler is not the best look, although, as a non-fan of the original track, I could personally appreciate the amphetamine version of the number a little more.
Maybe the album seems so short because Miley has booked Hollywood Bowl shows themed around it, and those will be awfully short performances if she sticks primarily to these nine numbers, which presumably she won’t. It doesn’t feel like “Bass Persuades” is going to be an Event Album for Cyrus fans; her followers are notorious for finding her records polarizing, to the extent that an album like “Something Beautiful” earns comments calling it either one of her best or one of her weakest — and yet it wouldn’t be surprising if the fan base is unanimous in finding this new one belongs somewhere in the mid-section of any ranking. “Not bad” is probably not the reaction being sought when someone starts afresh in a business part of their career. But say this for her: she’s someone who never makes the same album twice. So if this one is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but just kind of whelming, it won’t diminish the appetite for what mode she’ll be in come Miley Mach 11.
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