Music Reviews

Listening to Lady Gaga’s relentless new CD, I can’t help but think of those old TV commercials in which a housewife would unscrew the cap to a bottle of Ajax liquid cleanser and unleash a “White Tornado” on her kitchen floor. Except in Gaga’s case, it’s a (bleached) white tornado being unleashed on every dancefloor of the planet.

How useless is it to resist? Just try to escape the funnel cloud of sing-along choruses and driving beats that punctuate not only the already (to use the Lady’s favorite word) monster hit “Born This Way” but also numerous other songs here. From the leadoff track, “Marry the Night” (which does for the syllable “Muh” what “Poker Face” did for “Puh”), to the fourteenth and final track, “The Edge of Glory” (which skews so old-school, you keep thinking Donna Summer is going to show up for a cameo instead of who actually, très-coolly, does: saxophonist Clarence Clemons), there are enough likely future chart-toppers strewn around here to make even the biggest Gaga naysayers simply Top Job-green with envy.