There are a couple of features in the album credits - by Brandi Carlile and Sia - but fans of either should be forewarned that the star billing doesn’t amount to much in either case. ![]() The singer just knows her inner Joan Jett doesn’t need to rev up its engines when she’s mellowing out with a minimalist, rhythm-section-based ballad like “Rose Colored Glasses” or getting a little more wacked out with a spooky avant-pop discursion like “Handstand.” On much of “Endless Summer Vacation,” she’s playing down the vocal drama and gymnastics that it might not always be immediately identifiable as her, in a blindfold test, though her aggressiveness as a singer does not stay in remission indefinitely. She can still belt, still grrrrowl, but uses those parts of her chops more as accents that stand out in these songs when she brings them out of her toolbox. Marrying the shifting tones of the material is the fact that Cyrus is almost never pushing things too hard vocally. It’s good to know that 2007’s “Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus” didn’t have to be the last album she’d ever put out with a split personality, in other words. The first half leans wistful - yes, you could almost say flowery - and the second is a little more about Cyrus as your favorite demon lover. None of these announce themselves with chapter stops, but they do lend the record not just variety but oddly satisfying bouts of momentums and dynamics. The final two numbers in the 13-song collection represent another 180, reverting to a purely acoustic mode. (Albeit one not nearly as sleepily pastoral as “Younger Now.”) Then things take a weird turn with an oddball centerpiece called “Handstand,” before tracks 7-11 head off into the realm of modern programming and moody, excitable synth-pop. Following the kickoff with “Flowers,” tracks 2-5 stay on the more organic side of things, sort of like a vintage soft-rock record. That terminology almost makes it sound like a mini-market… and it kind of is a pop convenience store, come to think of it, in offering a nice, quick selection of mostly easily digestible fare.īut there might be a different way of getting at how she’s subtly divided the record up into parts. In touting the album in advance, Cyrus has described it as having a prettier “a,m.” first half - as in morning, not the radio frequencies - and a slinkier “p.m.” second half. But it’s a fairly unpretentious pop record that has some stylistic micro-shifts that don’t announce themselves too proudly or loudly. That’s not to say that the album is as lazy, or laissez-faire, as the title might make it sound. ![]() Having established what “Endless Summer Vacation” isn’t, then, what is it? For lack of a better unifying descriptor: relaxed, at least to the extent that anyone as alpha as Cyrus can be. (Well, maybe not literally the last, because the album closes with a quiet demo version of “Flowers,” but an extended bout of revenge writing is not really where her head is at.) The succeeding songs don’t get too stuck in the single’s post-Dua Lipa brand of disco thump, but neither is there even a hint of revisiting the previous album’s Blondie-isms for a second. Guess what? It’s not! “Flowers,” inevitably positioned as the opening track, marks the first and last time on the record you will spend any amount of time hypothesizing about Liam Hemsworth. The throughly massive hit single that preceded it into the culture a couple of months ago, “Flowers,” seemed to promise a belated divorce album in the confessional style that’s come back into fashion. Which is maybe one reason why it’s one of her most enjoyable albums: by virtue of being just a little too slippery to paste a tag on. But to its credit, it doesn’t sound like another conscious reinvention, either. Her new album, “Endless Summer Vacation,” doesn’t really sound much like any of those previous records.
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