LOOK AT ME, DAMMIT! I'M EDGY AND CREATIVE! Yyyyeah, no thanks. I'm good.

Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz

When the first thing that springs to your mind while listening to an album is "Lulu", you know this is gonna be rough.

Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz is 92 minutes of what the fuck, and NONE of it is remotely listenable.  It's a bunch of aimless electronic psychedelia, which fits since the Flaming Lips are essentially her backing band on this project.  It's kinda like Hannah Montana covering the early works of Yoko Ono, remixed with EDM and put through a flanger.  The lyrics, vocals, cover art and sounds of this album are all a concentrated meditation on one thing:

REPULSION.

Everything about this project screams "I'm contagious.  RUN."  Thing is, none of these songs can possibly get stuck in your head, because they're not songs.  They're aural atrocities.  If there were some kind of lyrical content that said...fucking anything, or better yet if there were no lyrics at all, then this might've counted as avant-garde art or as a ballsy "statement" of some kind.  But here's the thing (actually, two):

1) Anthony Fantano called it: "Okay, you smoke pot...So does everyone else, and no one cares."

2) Albums don't matter anymore, so you can't "make a statement" with them.

People put out albums at this point simply because "that's how it's done."  It's the QWERTY keyboard of music.  (Though when you think about it, the QWERTY keyboard is the QWERTY keyboard of music, since that's how we got where we are today.)  People just want to hear songs.  Especially Miley Cyrus fans.  It's a single-driven world where people can literally just pick and choose which songs they even fuck with and aren't held captive by a medium where they have to sit through 87 minutes to get to track 23 on this if they wanted to hear it.  (God help you if you did want to hear it, though.  MAN.)

Which is also why this album won't negatively impact Miley Cyrus in the long run.  If she goes back to slinging catchy pop yogurt down an eager public's throat after this, no one will ever remember "Dead Petz" existed.  The entire exercise is just another event to put on her "edginess" resume.  I wish she'd just stop but hey, I understand.  She can't.