Woman Gaga Swings Excessive, Will get Glad on ‘Joker: Folie a Deux’

Woman Gaga stays in character on Harlequin. It’s her companion to Joker: Folie a Deux, impressed by her position as Harley Quinn. However it’s a luxuriant album of jazzy swing, principally requirements, proper in her candy spot. Harlequin is within the swank mode of her Tony Bennett albums Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, in addition to her Jazz & Piano residency in Vegas. It’s the primary time she’s recorded requirements since her beloved Bennett handed away final 12 months. As she instructed Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio, she wished to “create a contemporary tackle classic pop.”

Gaga is looking this “LG 6.5,” because the world eagerly awaits the subsequent full-on Gaga album, as a result of arrive in February — her first since 2020’s Chromatica. Harlequin is a tantalizing placeholder, nevertheless it’s all her, since Gaga’s ardour for Outdated Hollywood glamour and grotesquerie has all the time been deep in her fame-monster soul. She brings a great deal of her personal character and presence to “The Joker” — the Anthony Newley/Lesley Bricusse present tune from The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Scent of the Crowd, made well-known by Shirley Bassey. (Not the Steve Miller Band ode to midnight tokin’.) She echoes Judy Garland all over the place, from “Good Morning” to “Get Glad.”

She rocks out in “I’ve Obtained The World on a String,” the 1932 Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler normal, and scats up a storm in “If My Buddies Might See Me Now,” from the 1966 Verdon/Fosse hit Candy Charity. Different renditions are extra simple (“Near You”) or tied to the movie in ways in which don’t essentially stand on their very own, as in “Oh, When The Saints,” with a key change for practically each verse. For the killer finale, she vamps by way of the Sixties Sinatra swagger of “That’s Life,” an ideal track for Gaga — her bravado remembers the David Lee Roth model. When she belts, “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a queen,” it’s a press release of truth.

However the spotlight is her personal “Glad Mistake,” one of many two originals amid the requirements, together with the frothy waltz “Folie a Deux.” She faucets into the connection between her alter ego Harley Quinn and herself, hiding her ache behind make-up and costumes so the present can go on, weeping the tears of a clown when there’s nobody round. “My head is crammed with damaged mirrors,” Gaga laments, over the acoustic guitar. “If I might repair the damaged items/Then I’d have a contented mistake.” It’s not the primary time she’s requested how she received hooked on the fixed consideration and adoration of the world. On Harlequin, she makes use of all these artifacts of classic pop to proceed a narrative she’s been telling her total profession.