On first flush, Adam Lambert was outlandishly specific. In 2009, he exploded American Idol from within, a peacock who stood out for his theatrical vocal shrieks and his treating of the show as one long Broadway audition. He came in second, losing to the vocal rice cake Kris Allen in what felt like a referendum on the unimaginativeness of the American reality-contest voting public.
In the real world, it turned out that his brand of excess was divisive, too. Lambert has pinballed from concept to concept — an electropop aspirant one moment, a replacement lead vocalist for Queen the next.
Maybe, to succeed, Lambert had to find a way to submit to something greater. And on The Original High, his third full-length record, he’s managed just that. The album is executive produced by Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish pop mercenaries with abiding love of 1980s flash and 1990s dance music verve. They have found in Lambert an ability to be vague. Perversely, that’s set him free.
Ghost Town is perhaps his best single to date. At the first chorus, it becomes an early-’90s club thumper, and Lambert doesn’t try to best the beat. Instead, he becomes a house diva, singing with precision and ambition but in service of the song. The strategic restraint continues on The Original High, and even into Another Lonely Night, which could have come from the Top Gun soundtrack. He sings with particular intensity on Lucy, a grand-scaled 1980s rock-style epic, but even here he lets the guitar have the loudest word.
Lambert has attempted pop on this scale before, on his 2012 album, Trespassing, but he was still battling with style then. Here, Lambert has fully committed to formula: 10 out of these 11 songs are under four minutes. While there are a few missteps — Lambert doesn’t have the R&B sultriness required for Underground, and Rumors bizarrely cribs the jaunty synth pattern from Lil Wayne’s Lollipop — there are almost no extravagances. After years of spectacle, Lambert may have been saved by modesty.
