That hedging of bets is basically a good thing: You don’t want an album of 22 songs just focused on one person’s suffering. It’s a diary opened up and turned into sheet music with blood all over the pages, yes… except for the moments when it just wants to turn into a pop album. We should probably add that assessments are complicated by “The Art of Starting Over” not knowing exactly what kind of album it wants to be. And… we wish the songs were a little better. It’s almost landmark-worthy, really, in that confessional pop-rock lineage we were just discussing, for how few filters she cares to put on a private life made public. If “Starting Over” did come to us in isolation, with no attendant projects or hype to manipulate expectations, here, to the best of our ability to theorize that situation, is what we’d probably end up saying about it: It is, in fact, bold and brazen, and sometimes harrowing (to use all the adjectives already applied to the movie), and Lovato has chutzpah from Malibu to the Atlantic and back for laying herself out in terms this raw. And it’s not just the documentary: Judgment may be further clouded by Thursday night’s release of a music video for the half-title-song, “Dancing With the Devil,” which is bound to elicit strong pro-and-con opinions by putting Lovato in near-death makeup, recreating the worst moments of her life in song as she sings from a hospital gurney, tubes up her nose in place of an earpiece. Probably any other record in that storied tradition delivered its candor and shocks right on release day, though, not following a feature-film-length teaser, which makes this sprawling 18-song collection (22 in the bonus-augmented digital edition!) tougher to evaluate on its own. “The Art of Starting Over” (let’s henceforth refer to the album by the second half of its bifurcated title, to avoid confusion with the film) fits squarely into a tradition of confessional pop that stretches at least from John Lennon’s about-to-be-reissued “Plastic Ono Band” to most of the Taylor Swift oeuvre.
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