Born This Way, Lady Gaga’s second full length studio album, has spent nine months since its initial announcement at the MTV Video Awards (yes- meat dress night ’10) forming in the minds of dedicated Monsters (Gaga’s name for her fans) worldwide. In this time, a gestation period perhaps, we have seen BTW tattoos, been tantalised with release dates and have heard titillating samples of songs like Scheiße and Government Hooker. Like its predecessor The Fame Monster, BTW was recorded over several months whilst on tour. However, noticeable on this album is a lack of a strong core theme like the ones that characterised Gaga’s first two records; The Fame adorned with glamour, paparazzi and sex, The Fame Monster steeped in dark views of romance, addiction and suffocation.

That being said the album is still consistently strong, in some ways not what many of us were expecting from it. Oddly for a pop album, the token ballad, Yoü and I, is just stunning; beautifully produced but not artificial in the slightest. It is this track and songs like The Edge of Glory where Gaga best showcases her musical skill both as a vocalist and a composer. The saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons alongside the gentle synthpop of the song’s main body isn’t remotely out of place and adds sensitive pathos to a song about a person’s ‘last moments on earth’, inspired by the passing of her grandfather in September 2010.

The dominating sounds of the album though are without doubt the heavy, electronic club beats of Scheiße, Government Hooker and the disco-ready Bad Kids. These are the naughty tracks of the album: Scheiße opens with a minute of solid indecipherable German before thrusting into hard core lyrics dealing with feminism, sexuality and downright bad behaviour; here Gaga’s voice lacks the sweet gentility present elsewhere on the album. Similarly charged, Government Hooker is an embittered critique of authority, whereas Bad Kids is an appeal, much like the album’s eponymous lead single, to any disenfranchised youths listening- Don’t be insecure/If your heart is pure/You’re still good to me/You’re a bad kid, Baby.

BTW, the album’s lead single certainly takes pride of place on the album’s tracklist. Encompassing Gaga’s extensive gay-rights campaigns, views on equality and, vague as they are here, her attitudes towards God, BTW is truly Gaga from its cover art to its Dalí-inspired accompanying video. So much of this artist, perceived as shallow and one-dimensional by many, is laid bare on this album, and most of it visible on this track alone.

A victim of heavy negative criticism on the album has been Judas, "condemned" for sounding too much like Gaga’s international platinum #1 hit, Bad Romance. There’s a whole lot of Gaga hate out there; in newspaper columns, nightclubs- the Westboro Baptist Church has a campaign. However, if you believe in art and expressive performance, I really urge you to put all of this to one side and analyse, critique, understand, research (and of course listen to) this album- it really is a rich piece of pop culture and concept art with valuable underlying messages well worth chewing over.