Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way, has to be one of the most ridiculous albums of the year, it’s downright shameless with it’s big dance anthems. The record starts off with “Marry The Night”, a track that starts off with some slow ballad sounds and then then the track hits with a massive chorus and orders you to sing along. This formula of massive, catchy chorus shows up again and again on tracks like “Judas” (a song that sounds way too much like “Bad Romance” at times and the use of her own name in the song is just stupid at this point) and “Hair” a song about loving your hair.

“Americano” is just a rip off of her own “Alejandro”, while “Bad Kids” sounds like a horrible track  left over from the eighties. The Eighties are all over Born This Way. The sounds of big metal guitar and heavy drums sound straight out of a bad eighties rock band. Somehow, Lady Gaga makes this acceptable. If any other artist recorded something like Born This Way they would have been laughed at for being so damn over-the-top, but it’s works for an artist like Gaga.

Anthems keep Born This Way going strong. Gaga knows how to make some damn catchy choruses. Every track on this album has a big chorus and she urges you to sing along. This is one the biggest pop albums in recent memory. Every single song here shows Gaga pushing herself to make some the most shameless, bombastic pop music ever and she achieves.

For God’s sake, one of the song titles is “Heavy Metal Lover”! (the song doesn’t live up to it’s title)

And that album cover!

Of course nothing on this record comes close to “Born This Way”, a song that will be around long after Lady Gaga.  From the second the song starts it hits, unlike other tracks that don’t bring anything until the chorus hits.

Tracks like “Electric Chapel”,  the massive ballad “You And I” and the Meat Loaf americana of “Highway Unicorn (Road To Love)” show Gaga’s love for massive eighties music by making these track bigger than most stuff made in the eighties (even Meat Loaf!) She even pulls in Bruce Springsteen’s saxophone player, Clarence Clemons, on the closer “Edge of Glory”.

While Born This Way is her biggest album yet, it’s not her best. There’s none of the icy coolness on “Dance In The Dark” (my favorite Lady Gaga track) or “So Happy I Could Die” and the overall production on The Fame Monster is better than Born This Way. While one relied on cool dance tracks, the other on massive anthems.

None of these tracks really work without the others, hearing songs by themselves will leave the listener confused. The sound of this album is quite consistent. The big house beats with huge guitars and massive drums is a new sound Gaga and no one else in pop music is making stuff quite like this. But is that a good thing?

Rating: 6.3 out of 10.