Album review: Endless Summer Vacation, by Miley Cyrus
Miley Cyrus, Endless Summer Vacation.
★★★☆☆
One of last year’s best pop albums was Noah Cyrus’s The Hardest Part. It was a fully-realised artistic vision layered through with Cyrus’ angst about drug use and bad break-ups. It was her full-length debut yet it suggested she had a complete grasp of who she was as an artist.
That is in contrast to her big sister, Miley, who, across her career has hopscotched between personas without ever settling into one identity. She’s been a child star, a musical “wrecking ball” and a collaborator with psychedelic pranksters The Flaming Lips.
As with sister Noah she has also had her heart broken and the assumption going into Endless Summer Vacation was that it would unpack the break up of her marriage to Liam Hemsworth. In fact, her eighth album tries to be everything at once and misfires as often as it succeeds.
Its highs, though, are fantastic – as illustrated by the single Flowers, a delicious mix of confessional songwriting and retro disco. Elsewhere, Cyrus veers all over. And that’s despite an attempt to impose on the LP a concept of day and night duality. Endless Summer Nights is divided into AM and PM – the former representing “the morning time, where there's a buzz and energy and there's a potential of new possibilities”, the latter the night, which "feels like there's a slinky, seediness and kind of a grime but a glamour at the same time”.
It’s a promising idea which never quite comes through in the songs, created by Cyrus with a mixed bag of producers including Adele collaborator Greg Kurstin, electronica crooner James Blake, and country singer Brandi Carlisle.
Cyrus is a magnetic pop star and vocal powerhouse. The shame, then, is that she didn’t pour the hurricane of emotions with which she has wrestled into a more coherent end product. Instead, she has created a scattershot portrait of traumatic times – a record that goes everywhere yet rarely hits the target.
