Beyonce’s new visual album: Flawless

Beyonce is flawless so no one else has to be.

That’s the theme of her superb fifth studio album, Beyonce, which arrives as a feat of both music and promotion. Its songs are steamy and sleek, full of erotic exploits and sultry vocals; every so often, for variety, they turn vulnerable, compassionate or pro-feminist. And with both the songs and the videos, Beyonce consolidates one of pop’s most finely balanced personas; she is, at once, glamorous and down-home, carnal and sweet, “Queen Bey” and a diligent trouper, polished and human. “Underneath the pretty face is something complicated,” she sings in No Angel.

Beyonce suddenly appeared in the iTunes music store with no prior hype — though plenty thereafter — at midnight on Thursday in the US. That’s the latest iteration of a tactic already used this year by David Bowie and My Bloody Valentine, who also released albums with no announcement or build-up.

Of course, Beyonce one-upped them: Beyonce is a “visual album” and includes elaborate videos for every song, many of them made on location — in France, Brazil, Australia — while the multitasking Beyonce was taking her Mrs. Carter Show tour around the world.

“When I’m connected to something, I immediately see a visual or a series of images that are tied to a feeling or an emotion, a memory from my childhood, thoughts about life, my dreams or my fantasies. And they are all connected to the music,” Beyonce said.

Instagram announcement

She needed only an Instagram announcement to draw international attention, and the album immediately went to No. 1 in 90 countries on iTunes’ rankings. Music trade publication Billboard, citing sources, said the album sold 80,000 copies within three hours of its iTunes release.

It was no secret that she had been working for a long time on the album, her first since 4, in 2011.

The 32-year-old Grammy-winning performer said she wanted to release the music in a new way, in order to connect more directly with her fans.

“There’s so much that gets between the music, the artist and the fans,” Beyonce said in a statement. “I felt like I didn’t want anybody to give the message when my record is coming out.”

By not manufacturing discs until the album appeared online — they are promised to retail stores before Christmas — her label avoided the leaks that often occur during manufacturing and distribution. Neatly done.

In a year full of overblown marketing campaigns for albums that were letdowns — among them, Magna Carta ... Holy Grail, by Beyonce’s husband, Jay Z — Beyonce should long outlast the initial stir. The songs are alert to the current sound of clubs and radio, but not trapped by it; the refrains are terse and direct, but what happens between them isn’t formulaic. And while Beyonce constructed the songs with a phalanx of collaborators, they all know better than to eclipse her creamy, soulful voice.

Collaborations

After the scattershot styles on 4, Beyonce has chosen to stick with largely electronic R&B. She worked with longtime hitmakers — Pharrell Williams, Timbaland, The-Dream, Justin Timberlake — and relative newcomers like Hit-Boy and Boots. Mostly, they supply her with means of seduction: particularly in Rocket, an ultraslow tease that looks back to Prince (by way of the Prince fans Miguel and Timberlake, who are among the songwriters), as harmonies blossom all around Beyonce’s cooing lead vocal.

The even more explicit Partition has a sparse synthesiser pulse and little swoops before a whispery chorus joins her. Superpower, a vow of lasting “tough love” that’s a duet with Frank Ocean, gives doo-wop a futuristic sheen, as her voice goes low and smoky. Meanwhile, Jealous — about promises, suspicion and potential revenge — turns into an accusatory anthem.

But Beyonce offers solidarity alongside romance. Heaven is a mourning song with hymnlike piano, offering tearful comfort: “Heaven couldn’t wait for you/So go on, go home”; it may be heard at funerals for years to come. Flawless, with a staccato, trap-flavoured track, mixes growling celebrity autobiography — “I took some time to live my life/but don’t think I’m just his little wife” — with a feminist speech from a Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and a sisterly cheer, “I look so good tonight!”

The album’s opener is Pretty Hurts, written with Sia Furler, which denounces “plastic smiles” and warns, “It’s the soul that needs the surgery.” Its video shows beauty pageant contestants in backstage distress, and both video and audio snippets of the album remind us that Beyonce has been a performer and contestant since childhood.

The song Blue features vocals from baby Blue Ivy, who was born in January 2012.

Flawless begins and ends with a televised talent contest lost by one of Beyonce’s many youthful groups, Girls Tyme (raising the hindsight question of where the winners are now). And while most of the videos show Beyonce in elaborate designer luxury with dancers and actors, she also appears among ordinary people on Coney Island, in Brazil and at a Houston roller disco.

The full album includes a video of Grown Woman — a song that appeared this year as a Pepsi commercial — that juxtaposes images of the wealthy, grown-up Beyonce, drink in hand, with grainy shots of her youthful efforts as a performer: eager, smiling, diligent. Superstar and striver, impossibly accomplished without forgetting a humble start, Beyonce has it both ways, and Beyonce makes it believable.