Album Review: Harlequin by Lady Gaga

Goo goo for Gaga again. It's pretty fitting that Gaga was cast as Harley Quinn, because her career trajectory for the last decade or so has jokerfied me. While it has received more favorable reappraisals in recent years, 2013's ARTPOP was released to a tepid response that found both the general public and the lady herself straining to make sense of it all. The singer would then go on to belabor a point that we already knew: Gaga has talent and Gaga can sing.

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Lady Gaga has remarkable breadth. Perhaps pop's definitive 21st century alien, she's transformed dance-pop into a stadium-filling phenomenon, while touching on everything from indie rock to swing in the process. The much-vaunted 'LG7' is billed as a return to pure pop, but first she's got a new movie endeavour - Lady Gaga picks up the role of Harlequin in the outlandish comic book musical Joker: Folie a Deux.

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Not since 2011's Born This Way has Lady Gaga found a musical project big and brawny enough to contain her penchant for vocal bluster and over-the-top theatricality. But the singer turned actress's role as Harley Quinn in Todd Phillips's Joker: Folie à Deux and its companion album, Harlequin, seem to have given her all of the elbow room she needs to let her freak flag fly. Harlequin, whose title refers to the stock pantomime figure after which Harley Quinn was named, aptly begins with an interpretation of "Good Morning," originally sung by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, whose agile performances captured the heady elation of a romantic all-nighter.

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