Joanne
| Lady Gaga
Joanne
Joanne is the fifth studio album by American singer Lady Gaga. It was released on October 21, 2016, by Streamline and Interscope Records. The album's production was led by Gaga with Mark Ronson and BloodPop, alongside a variety of collaborators including Kevin Parker, Emile Haynie, Jeff Bhasker and Josh Homme. The music of Joanne features "stripped-down" soft rock and dance-popstyles which put emphasis on the singer's vocal abilities. Lyrically, the album delves on the theme of family and life's emotions, with the death of Gaga's aunt, Joanne Stefani Germanotta, having a deep influence on the record. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
Joanne is Lady Gaga’s best album in five years, since the disco-stick hair-metal manifesto that was Born This Way.
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NY Times
No pop album in recent memory has featured such a wide array of collaborations that strip those collaborators of their particular charms
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Pitchfork
Joanne feels too self-conscious, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear—the truest self, after all, isn’t always the quietest.
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NME
When Gaga strips herself back, what’s underneath is just a more streamlined strangeness.
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Entertainment Weekly
If Lady Gaga entered pop stardom with the subtlety of a disco ball, her latest record proves that she’s growing into something less glittering but no less colorful.
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Consequence of Sound
An inconsistent stab at genre promiscuity can’t hide the voice and the heart at the core of Gaga's talents
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The Atlantic
Her “personal” comeback album uses retro references in songs that don’t quite communicate what makes her special.
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The Telegraph
Lady Gaga, it turns out, is an old-fashioned rock and roll showgirl at heart.
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Pretty Much Amazing
Gaga has emerged as something better and truer.
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USA Today
The album gambles that listeners care as much about Gaga the artist as Gaga the spectacle. And her gamble pays off, in the most sonically varied, emotionally honest album of her career.
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New Zealand Herald
Is it the huge statement it was clearly meant to be? Not quite. But it's a nice change of pace for Mother Monster.
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Huffington Post
Sadly, while ‘Joanne’ isn’t a terrible album by any means, there’s little that’s going to keep either prior Gaga fans or fans of the music she’s now trying to make coming back for repeat listens.
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The Odyssey
It also happens to be her best album yet, and frankly, one of the best mainstream albums released in a long time.
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ComicsVerse
Devoid of the broad concept themes that characterize her first three solo efforts, JOANNE is Gaga writing at her most personal as she tries to figure out who she is at this point in her life.
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Sputnik Music
For the well adjusted amongst us, Joanne is just about the worst album released this year.
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Titan Radio
Lady Gaga’s “Joanne”, Is A Beautifully Unrefined Memoir
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AV Music
Joanne may not become the multiplatinum blockbuster Bella Donna was, but the record absolutely feels like Gaga is once again on an upward trajectory.
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NPR
This is Gaga without the bells and whistles, wearing a mask that looks like her own face.
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METRO
Its anomaly of a lead single aside, Joanne is her most cohesive, focused and mature album to date.
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Slant Magazine
Though Joanne lacks the indelible pop hooks that those two influences—not to mention Gaga herself—are famous for, the album is more sonically consistent and thematically focused than the singer’s last solo effort, the regressive Artpop.
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Drowned in Sound
We’ve witnessed a lot of pop queens come and go, but despite some career setbacks, Gaga is intent on sticking around for the long run.
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Us For Once Magazine
This poignant album serves a very clear purpose: to allow Gaga to embrace her personal transformation and let herself really be vulnerable on record.
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SPIN
Joanne seems more invested in blurring distinctions than drawing them out with pomp.
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Digital Spy
On Joanne, Lady Gaga hangs up her Mother Monster hat, and instead - with the help of Mark Ronson throughout - peels back the layers to unveil the human being beneath the superstar sheen.
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Journal Sentinel
Lady Gaga may no longer be the cartoonish persona unleashed on "Artpop," but "Joanne" isn't a deeply personal artistic statement either.
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All Music
... Joanne is decidedly earth-bound, a record made by an artist determined to execute only the stunts she knows how to pull off.
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CeleBuzz
Let’s not beat around the bush: Joanne is Lady Gaga‘s best album to date and it’s the album that anyone that has paid attention to her career, beyond the club hits and meat dresses, should have been expecting.
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Independent
Since Artpop, Lady Gaga’s musical career has tended towards retrenchment.
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Marie Claire
So with this, this imperfect illusion of realness, Joanne's ultimate purpose might be to remind us that life as a process—that every new look can take us one step closer to becoming the people we were all along.
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The Diamondback
A hodgepodge of folk rock, country and Americana built on a foundation of rippling guitars and funky synths.
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Mic
While Joanne attempts to chart a new sonic course for Gaga, in some ways her songwriting skills have not made the journey with her.
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Pop Sugar
It's hard to say if it's Lady Gaga's best album to date — each one is so vastly different from the last — but it sure strikes a powerful chord from the first note to the last.
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Financial Times
Upbeat numbers lack hooks while ballads feature committed singing (Gaga is an impressive belter) but no great sense of feeling.
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Clash
'Joanne’ is at its most pleasing during the album’s rather delightful country excursions, which all benefit from a comparatively minimal approach and less extravagant production.
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Us Weekly
This was Lady Gaga’s big chance to erase the memory of 2013’s abysmal last solo outing, Artpop. Instead, her fifth effort is a disjointed and unrealized mess that sounds as if Gaga got cast in a bad off-Broadway rock musical.
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The Quietus
Unfortunately, therein lies the biggest problem with Joanne: for every time that Gaga seemingly breaks free of her shackles and embraces something more “real,” she quickly scuttles back into her comfort zone and hides behind glistening production.
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The Ithacan
“Joanne” includes powerful messages that address love, loss and strength. It is, by far, one of Gaga’s best albums and shows her more sentimental side.
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Evening Standard
Joanne review: ‘a collection of serious, well-crafted songs’
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Pop Matters
Make no mistake: even with all her extracurricular endeavors paying off cultural dividends, Gaga's greatest achievement is yet to come, and Joanne, flaws and all, feels like the necessary step to get there.
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Contact Music
It's an admirable effort and an interesting predecessor for future releases, but Joanne is unfortunately a failed experiment.
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The Line of Best Fit
Taking Joanne at face value, it's not a perfect record and finds Gaga pulling in so many different directions, but these are songs tied together by a common feeling.
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The Jesuit Post
Joanne rockets between ballad and rock, funk and blues, country and dance pop.
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Forge Press
Her new music is targeted at a more mature and emotionally-literate audience.
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News Day
Lady Gaga’s comeback has great pop moments but tries way too hard.
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Cryptic Rock
There is a need for her to continually push the boundaries of how we define Pop music, to surprise us with her evolving sound and artistic expression.
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Spectrum Pulse
Her vocals are strong, her writing on a technical level is probably better than it's ever been, and there's about as much thematic cohesion as you'd expect for this sort of pop record.
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Irish News
Chameleon-like, she plunders America's traditions of country twang, rockabilly and Detroit's finest, although there's a significant lack of bona fide pop hits.
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Music Wrap Up
I guess this still proves that we still care about the music versus the image these artists put on.
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The Muse
It feels like a mix-tape of songs from three or four Lady Gaga albums that don’t actually exist, but it’s one I don’t mind having around.
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Press Play OK
... while the subject matter does seem personal it doesn’t feel like it’s particularly accessible to anyone other than Stefani Germanotta, let alone her Little Monsters. But when she gets it right, it’s utterly gorgeous...
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The Reflector
In essence and execution, Joanne is unfortunately another middle-of-the-road album from a pop phenom who’s trying to do something new in a genre that’s so cemented in its conventions.
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Vada Magazine
Lyrically and vocally, Lady Gaga’s fifth album Joanne is stunning.
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AusPop
I applaud Lady Gaga for sticking to her guns and doing the album she wants to; as an artist, it’s a tough balance between being who you want to be and appeasing the fans and industry.
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University Observer
This is the record Taylor Swift would make if she had the balls.
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Jon on Film
She manages to stick the landing.
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Diary of a Music Addict
“Joanne” is the album I had hoped “Artpop” would be.
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The Awesome Muse
And in this new album, which comes five years after her last good album, it’s her voice that is front and center.
Listeners Reviews
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A stray away from her previously released music, Joanne has lighter instrumentals, but still punches. A bit of a lean to Western and country-pop tones, it's not a bad sound for Gaga - even with splices of her synthesized ideals. 5/5
By Jasmine J
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