Lady Gaga: Artpop – review

Artpop finds Lady Gaga in an unfamiliar position – on the back foot, flexing hard to keep her dominion over 21st-century pop. On her fourth album, a great many elements are thrown at the wall – a splatter effect of ideas, acrylic digitals and a few rappers – in an effort to re-establish brand Gaga as some luridly necessary cultural force. Preceded by the usual teases and leaks, Artpop arrives on a wave of more unscripted drama too. Gaga performed a new track, Dope, live at the YouTube music awards the other night, weeping what certainly seemed like real tears. Live and on record, Dope is one of the more traditional and rewarding moments on Artpop, in which the former Stefani Germanotta sits at a piano, belting out a love song to her fans. "I need you more than dope," she slurs, plenty of saliva in her throat.

What the lyric lacks in poetry, it makes up for in believability, partly because the previous song on Artpop is Mary Jane Holland, a track about just how much Gaga values her marijuana, and partly because one of Gaga's strongest assets as a star has been her rapport with the fans – Little Monsters – who consume her stuff. Even more arresting than the tears, though, has been the news that Gaga has parted company with her manager, Troy Carter, whose hand has reportedly guided the business and technological aspects of Gaga's career, not least harnessing Little Monster power into the "likes", retweets and views of the new pop economy. Was he sacked? Did he leave a sinking ship? We don't know, but what is certain is that Applause, the first single, could only manage a so-so No 4 in the US charts, having been thrashed by Katy Perry's Roar, and as a result there's a slightly more frantic air than usual surrounding Artpop, which retrenches hard into club music after the mixed reaction to the rockier Born This Way (2011).

The sad news is that there is no killer blow on Artpop – no Bad Romance, basically – that will automatically glue Gaga to her pedestal. It's no instant classic, then, but neither is it the calamity that some have foreseen, being a typically mixed Gaga outing with some ludicrous highs, questionable digressions (Jewels 'N' Drugs, in which three rappers add little to the mix; or Donatella, a charmless ode to the equally charmless Versace supremo) and plenty of not-unpleasant filler.

All Gaga's talk of art and pop combining in some heretofore unimaginably radical way boils down to Jeff Koons designing the cover, and a track called Venus, which manages to pack in references to the Botticelli painting, outer space and cosmic jazzer Sun Ra (whose song Rocket Number Nine is used as source material, via leftfield French synth-rock act Zombie Zombie). The bloopy title track boasts the great reveal that "my Artpop could mean anything" and the impression of a pop star scrambling, post-hoc, towards coherence never goes away. Illusion, masks, bareness, posing: all are exercised as ideas, without Gaga really settling on a preference.

Some of the most disjointed tracks here make the most sense, perversely enough. Swine, premiered at the iTunes festival in September, remains a landmark collage of a song. There's the initial disgust directed at an abuser, rendered as umpteen pre-choruses, and there's the frenetic and lengthy digital workout, whose relation to the first bit is coincidental, at best, but whose pace is enticing. Swine is Artpop's wow-factor centrepiece, if not its greatest hit.

That would be the genuinely funky Fashion!, one of those rare times when you can actually hear Gaga's penchant for David Bowie in her tremendous, gliding vocal. "I own the world! We own the world!" she declares airily, on Artpop's only real moment of genuine artistic abandon.