"I want your Psycho, your Vertigo stick.
Want you in my Rear Window
Baby, it’s sick.
I want your love."

There you have it; Lady Gaga in a (ruby red Swarovski-crystal enstudded, pyrotechnics-enabled) nutshell. She’s fluent in Hitchcock, enjoys the phallus, keeps her double-entendres as subtle as a nine-iron applied directly to the forehead, is explicitly aware of herself and her perversion(s), and … she’s just like everybody else. All the elaborate headpieces and Danzig-by-way-of-Aguilera intonations in the world can’t distract from the rote, uncomplicated core of Gaga’s approach to music. She wants your love.

The balancing act between haute mess provocateur and accessible pop starlet is on full display in Lady Gaga’s eight-song addendum to her break-out debut, The Fame Monster. Where her freshman album went to great efforts to mug vacuously for the cameras, celebrating blurry nightlife and issuing blanket pardons to pop culture junkies (We’re plastic but we still! Have! Fun!), the latest collection of new songs flex lyrical muscles only hinted at previously, shows its teeth and entreats listeners to do the same. The Fame Monster seems an attempt on Gaga’s part to stitch together her Ziggy Art-Stardust theatrics with a fleshy but loosely-defined persona beneath the surface. While the results project an admirable sense of depth, her style continues to upstage her substance, and without the elaborate visuals, this Frankenstein monster fails to surprise, frighten, or rattle the senses. The consolation prize? — It still makes for a great pop album.

The EP kicks off with the bombastic lead single "Bad Romance," a staid embrace of the war of the sexes in all its passion, violence, and backstabbing glory. In it, Gaga descends chanting into the battlefield, employs a small army of Viking synths, engages the enemy head-on, rejects the neutrality of friendship outright, pillages the goods (Walk, walk, fashion baby), and asserts her sovereignty, but still she must periodically bow like a puny human before a force greater than herself, a soaring chorus whose melancholy strains offer Gaga no hope for victory, only the expectation of more carnage down the line.

Even without the accompanying — and excellent — music video, it’s likely the most successful reveal of a complicated and fascinating animal behind the veil. And while there are other stand-outs on the album, "Bad Romance" remains unmatched throughout, as Gaga opts out of outdoing herself in favor of paying dutiful (and mostly successful) homage to pop stars of the past. "Alejandro," while featuring likely the worthiest titular subject of any song in the history thereof, reheats the Swedish sounds of Ace of Bass and ABBA, while "Dancer in the Dark" cribs the gay-friendly shimmer of Erasure and Pet Shop Boys.

"Speechless," a glossy but heartfelt paean to classic rock balladry inspired by a sudden threat to her father’s health, recalls Bowie or The Beatles in top form. From the looks of recent public performances, it seems slated as the second single, and rightly so; where "Bad Romance" resonates with stony conviction, "Speechless" sheds light into a vulnerability that is real and potent. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and Gaga, the very picture of controlled eccentricity, cannot produce expression (I’ll never write a song/won’t even sing along/I’ll never love again), the abyss that opens up between malleable artifice and immovable reality is darker and scarier than any snarling McQueen-clad warrior could conjure up. Unfortunately, the song is slathered in over-production, its polished sheen diminishing the real heartache at the center.

The remainder of the album mostly middles its way through the contemporary pop landscape, featuring songs that could easily have been filler or B-side material for the Katy Perrys, Gwen Stefanis, Robyns, or even Madonnas of the world. And that’s fine. Stefani Germanotta, the woman behind the curtain, is a pop songwriter. But we were promised Gaga! How could this powerhouse talent literally phone it in on the interminable, half-assed "Telephone," mining through the inanity already covered in "Just Dance"? We already know you lost your keys and your phone, we might’ve guessed some dopey unwanted Romeo was trying to get in touch, too.

Nonetheless, Lady Gaga is a breath of fresh air. Even if she hasn’t taken all the musical risks available to her, she’s still pushing the limits of her creation and her medium in an industry that rewards predictability over innovation. And from a personal perspective, while I’m not immune to the dance-floor charms of my generation’s Girls Who Just Wanna Have Fun, I’ve never felt the desire to devote column inches to the mystique of Britney Spears.

Pop stardom is a peculiar place, with myriad rules governing sound and image, and Lady Gaga endeavors to bend the rules to her liking without suffering eviction. So she wants to have her cake and wear it on her head, too. That’s fine by me — it’s a delicious mess.