“Vanity project” isn’t exactly an insult. Contrary to certain websites’ critiques, “vanity project” can actually be a compliment. It represents an artist creating for themselves, building a work specifically for and around their ego. It means that, whatever the product is, it’s an expression of that artist at that single moment in time: the “honesty” that so many music fans feel is missing in modern music.
Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is a vanity project by design. She dropped it at random over SoundCloud, expressing clearly that this wasn’t a record made to sell or a record made to fulfill a contract. It sprawls across 23 tracks, none of them flexing the razor pop muscle of Bangerz or any of the obvious singles that Cyrus took viral two years ago. There’s no stadium shakers, no cut-and-paste catchphrases like “We Can’t Stop” (other than the co-opted Nike ad “Dooo It!”). She’s clearly just singing for herself.
We get stories about Miley’s life that would give the censors at iHeartMedia an anxiety complex. We get her getting high with friends. We get her getting high alone. We get spoken word monologues about breaking up with a guy who does “that thing” she likes, and then taking it all back. We get a sexual liberator with no subtlety (“Bang Me Box” is about as self-explanatory an innuendo can get). We get Miley being Miley, doing Miley things and not being afraid of the stigma that comes with that. The VMA performance of “Dooo It!” that debuted Cyrus’s project was almost as notable for MTV’s free-form censorship as it was for, well, all of its Cyrus-isms.
But Cyrus is more than her own bacchanalia these days, contrary to Dead Petz’s fixations. The public Miley Cyrus is a champion for LGBTQ rights, informed by her own experiences with gender fluidity. She’s a powerful voice whose musical conscience runs a spectrum of Loretta Lynn, hip-hop and psychedelic mind meddling. Cyrus is a musician aware of her public perception and her economic worth, and knows she can use that to really try whatever musical bend she’s feeling at that moment with little repercussion.
This is why she can get away with Dead Petz, which sounds more like a musical sigh than a personal manifesto. Most of its unjustifiable length sounds more like a Flaming Lips spin-off, where Cyrus echoes into a dreamscape of synthesizers and drum machines. Synthesizers do their loops over acoustic guitars, melodies mumble in the atmosphere and songs come out of psychedelic ramblings about alien invasions and saving blowfish.
Sometimes, it’s gorgeous, like “The Floyd Song (Sunrise).” Most times, though, it sounds like Miley just doesn’t care—which she’s wont to do. There could be moments of sincerity ruined by something as ridiculous as a fever dream Cyrus felt like sharing as an aside, or moments that can’t really shed their cheesy insights (“Can’t you see, all the clouds are dying?” she pleads on “1 Sun”). Then there are the moments of blatant offense, like “Pablow the Blowfish,” a beautiful track that lulls you in with the album’s most touching balladeer work (it doesn’t matter how corny a love song about a blowfish is). It’s genuinely moving—until Cyrus fake cries her way through the coda.
So, Dead Petz exists. At its best, it sounds like Miley Cyrus is exploring a texture she really hasn’t before and is trying to prove her worth as a free-flowing artist, one not limited to her pop bravado or—even more retroactively—that Disney-girl icon of which people seriously need to let go. During its brightest moments, Miley sounds like she’s actually owning Miley, rather than selling Miley. But at its worst, Dead Petz sounds like an exercise in unfiltered self-indulgence, an album Miley made for no reason other because she could.
Rating: C-
