With Bass Persuades, Miley opens a new artistic phase by giving up the surname Cyrus. Between electronic pop, dance and references to the Eighties,
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Miley is no longer Cyrus. It is the first declaration of Bass Persuades, the tenth studio album signed with only his first name and accompanied by a new visual identity built with Mert Alas and Alastair McKimm.
The surname that for twenty years represented both legacy and encumbrance disappears from the credits. Remaining just Miley is a precise identity choice: leaving out of the picture what comes before to try to redefine what comes after.
At the center of the album is love, described by the artist as something complex, mobile, impossible to reduce to a single dimension. A path that continues the one undertaken in the last three albums and which here seems to find a more pacified form, intertwining with the transformation of the relationship with herself. Changing your gaze on your body and your identity also means changing your way of being in a relationship.
The title Bass Persuades, however, shifts the discussion from confession to physicality. The bass persuades because it arrives before thought, it moves the body before the mind even has time to interpret it. It’s an interesting idea, above all because it suggests a less cerebral and more instinctive pop, built to be listened to but also physically traversed.
The problem is that the concept appears more defined than the music that should embody it. Miley says she established the tracklist and sound direction before even writing the songs, then letting each song find its own form. An almost organic conception of writing, in which the piece becomes a small entity capable of indicating on its own what it needs.
When the disk follows this logic, it works. Let’s Get Married and Orbit they constitute its most convincing core precisely through subtraction. They are intimate pieces that avoid loading the feeling with emphasis and find a certain elegance in the measure.
On the more physical side, Bass Persuades is the most immediate manifesto: Eighties-inspired synth-pop, clear pulsation, explicit invitation to leave the screens to return to the body. Different Religion instead it opens up an interesting crack thanks to the presence of New Yorkers Model/Actresswhich insert an almost no wave urgency into the pop fabric. Innocent Ways instead it looks to the electro-pop season of the first Lady Gaga, that of The Fame, recovering its synthesis and brilliance without always managing to transform them into a truly personal signature.
REDLIGHTS it moves between dance and retro, but the banjo ends up weighing down the song more than it manages to characterize it. Even more unresolved Neon Signswith Andrew Wyatt by Miike Snow: deliberately over the top moans and very light pop alternate without finding a real point of friction, let alone a synthesis.
This is where Bass Persuades shows its limits. Miley tries to get rid of a surname that has now become a cumbersome sign to build a more essential, physical, adult identity. But nominal liberation does not automatically coincide with a new musical grammar. The album has a clear idea of ​​what it wants to be, less so of how to become it.
