Lady Gaga's "The Fame Monster" will eat your heart and your brain.

The Fame Monster
ARTIST: Lady Gaga
LABEL: Cherrytree Records

With structured sequin headdresses, feathered Jean Paul Gaultier collars and leather-latex body suits, Lady Gaga’s wardrobe is the stuff of Alexander McQueen’s dreams, but how does her fashion controversy line up with her new music? This week, Gaga released an addition to her debut album “The Fame” aptly titled “The Fame Monster,” which features eight new tracks.
Those first enamored by G’s use of disco-inspired pop beats and reworked house music will find comfort in “The Fame Monster’s” heavy bass lines and jazzy guitar solos. But what the album really offers is a peek into the hidden emotional side that the bedazzled starlet seems to hide under her alien-like getups. While she always retains a cool exterior, “The Fame Monster” tells of the darker aspects of in-the-spotlight success and rampant sexual prowess.
Her new album refuses to linger on music about drinking, dancing and gushy love as did her debut single “Just Dance” and several of “The Fame’s” other tracks like “Beautiful Dirty Rich” and “Eh, Eh (There’s Nothing Else I Can Say).” Instead, Gaga channels several past and present stars from David Bowie to Christina Aguilera in a way that mingles the macabre with night-out glitz.
Drawing from Madonna’s “Vogue,” “Dance in the Dark” twists the 1990 hit to invoke a discussion of verbal abuse and sex with the lights off. Gaga belts out, “She looks good, but her boyfriend says she’s a tramp ... but she still does her dance.” Later, she calls on Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, JonBenet Ramsey and even film director Stanley Kubrick, as if they’re foot soldiers of empathy.
Though it’s apparent that Lady Gaga need not rely heavily on autotune, her voice often borders on dispensable mimicry. The problem with trying to express a dark concept, is sometimes you inadvertently shift from electro-pop flaunting to high school-era, black-eyeliner angst. “Monster,” the album’s title-track, does exactly this in its best moments. Even though the beats sound like something lifted from Britney’s “Blackout,” the lyrics border on zombie-fiction as her woeful tale turns to a boy eating her brain.
Though the album has its weak points — “Telephone”, featuring the ever-sparkling Beyonce, sounds like a track from a coked-out Gwen Stefani solo-album — Gaga proves that she is the perfect pop-star hybrid. It’s even becoming safe to say that she’s this generation’s Madonna. Unlike other starlets, she doesn’t ooze sexy with the placid gaze of a blow-up doll, but she creates it herself, make-up artists and booking agents be damned. The American public can expect at least a few more slews of reinvention that musically, though probably not timeless, are accurate depictions our age’s tech-savvy lifestyle and materialistic luxury.
Though the public seems to be divided over Lady Gaga’s otherworldly fashion and morbid performances, it remains clear that she understands the mechanisms of mass culture and is fighting her way toward stardom.