Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz

Dead Petz is Miley Cyrus with a creative vision, putting the self-expressiveness of her personal life into her music.

If you can force yourself to slog through the bullshit and actually pay close attention to the album, you’ll emerge from the experience interested and engaged.

It’s bloated, self-indulgent and occasionally cringey – but never boring. A couple of tracks are up with the best of 2015.

Most of Dead Petz sounds pretty much like the Lips' latter-day output — she aims for Coyne-like high notes that don't suit her lowdown voice. But she scores wacko successes like "Milky Milky Milk," "Cyrus Skies" and "Slab of Butter (Scorpion)," along with cameos from Big Sean, Ariel Pink and producer Mike Will Made It.

Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz needs an editor, but there's more than enough worthwhile music here to transcend shock value.

Make no mistake, some of this album is unlistenable ... But Cyrus is also too skilled of an artist to not place some beauty inside this madness.

The playful experimentalism and inherently subversive nature of Dead Petz is enjoyable (in a sickly-sweet way) throughout, yet it’s experimentation is akin to playing absent-mindedly with a shitty synthesizer iPhone app.

It’s ... undoubtedly the most interesting and substantial thing Cyrus has ever done, an absolute beast of an album with twenty three tracks that sometimes hit, sometimes miss and sometimes transcend either category and just become a portal to the weird.

It’s a messy, deeply personal move that finds Cyrus unabashedly putting forth an unapologetically full-fledged reinvention of self, one lacking in timidity and subtlety.

What is most surprising, perhaps, is not that Miley Cyrus has self-released a goofy, addled sonic experiment, but that, in the post-label, internet age, more pop stars in her position haven’t.

On Petz, the total lack of unpredictability is what betrays Cyrus’ true lack of imagination, her fatal flaw as a Youth Culture Messiah.