MILEY CYRUS - Something Beautiful

I doubt Miley Cyrus reads OndaRock, but all the same I couldn't help smiling a few months ago, when the only piece of information circulating about "Something Beautiful" was her confessed debt to "The Wall" by Pink Floyd. Few things ruffle old rockers' feathers quite like a glamour-tinted female trespassing on the Untouchables – and voilà: adorned on the cover by a Thierry Mugler piece from '97, Miley resurfaces on our screens like a digital-age Cher, liquid and recyclable with every release thanks to a malleable yet incisive presence.

This time, album number nine (!) holds more than a few surprises in store; half aching soul ballad, half cathode-ray psychedelic jolts, the title track comes in on a counterattack, painting a more layered and compelling picture than the pop straightforwardness of "Endless Summer Vacation". Not to mention "End Of The World", an emotional soft-rock number dedicated to her mother, delivered with tears in her eyes and fist clenched open. Sure, thematically "Something Beautiful" doesn't stray too far from the past, presenting us once again with a songwriter who remains deeply American, still romantic and desperate, but the sonic dress takes on an unprecedented electro-acoustic richness. The rest of the accompanying imagery for this visual album, due out at the end of the month, will explain the sequencing of a decidedly odd tracklist.

The first part of the record, in fact, echoes the aforementioned singles, starting with the other ballad, "More To Lose", skillfully streaked with sax and backing vocals, then the muscular blues of "Easy Lover" and the soft "Golden Burning Sun", two tracks that pick up the threads of "Plastic Hearts" and "Younger Now" respectively, but with newfound maturity beneath a grainy thread of analog poetry. But if the cinematic "Prelude" that opens the album already hinted at a grandiloquent orchestral taste, it's the two "Interlude" pieces, placed around the album's midpoint, that supply the jarring electronic edge of a record that refuses to simply rest on its laurels.

This is where we encounter “Walk Of Fame,” a dense synthetic gallop featuring Brittany Howard on backing vocals, somehow managing to evoke both “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat and the techno chanting of Underworld, yet against all odds the result works. That same thrilling sense of disorientation returns with “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved,” an almost raspy synth-pop number in the vein of Lady Gaga, were it not for the serene supermodel Naomi Campbell stepping into the role of an MC presiding over a vogue ceremony.

Lunar and moody, “Pretend That You’re God” strips away the rhythmic drive in favor of pressing lyrical bitterness and thick electric frequencies, so that when “Reborn” returns to the dancefloor dressed up as saturated orchestral dance music filtered through Gregorian echoes, it feels like stumbling onto a post-2000 Pet Shop Boys number.

Never truly revolutionary, and nowhere near the scaffolding of the much-feared Pink Floyd, “Something Beautiful” works thanks to the sense of adventure running through its grooves – and even when its ideas risk feeling alienating against the usual pop vocabulary, Miley's by-now instinctive skill as a performer never lets her get caught off guard. The baroque plucked strings of “Give Me Love” help the listener open their eyes again right at the last moment, to take in, wholeheartedly, a red sunset of love – here Miley lets herself go without restraint, probably already aware that she has crafted an album capable of carrying her ever further from her TV-star beginnings.

It's all popmuzik, it's all artifice, a series of dazzling sets and costumes framing a lean figure worthy of a perfect model and manipulator – and yet these fifty minutes of music deliver exactly what they promise: something beautiful.

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01/06/2025