Madame X: Reviews

[Sestri Levante 911]

1 hour ago, Hades said:

"Where the desire to dance does not dominate (as in the reinterpretation of the Brazilian hit 'Faz Gostoso' with Anitta), the tones are in fact often dark: as in 'Dark Ballet', a rhapsody of genres and styles ranging from Cajkovsky's pop to the Nutcracker''

Brazilian Hit 

[Hades 27,980]

1 minute ago, Sestri Levante said:

Brazilian Hit 

It's Portuguese right? I just copied the article. Their fault if they info is wrong.

[Sestri Levante 911]

1 hour ago, Hades said:

It's Portuguese right? I just copied the article. Their fault if they info is wrong.

Yeah, they probably just assumed it when they saw and heard Anitta on the track 

[DavieX 330]

Another 4 out of 5 strars 

 

Madame X review – a splendidly bizarre return to form

 ‘Solid confidence in her own aesthetic decisions’: Madonna. Photograph: Steven Klein

Madonna is in her fourth decade of what we now somewhat suspiciously call appropriation, a pick-and-mix skill set that has previously laid the singer open to accusations of unoriginality or, worse, cultural hijacking.

But when the patented Ciccone filtration system gets it right, the process is just shy of alchemy. Sexualised Catholicism, at the dawn of MTV, was Madonna’s first stroke of kismet. The last time Madonna was indisputably on point, she had hooked up with French producer Mirwais for Music (2000)and the sensuous possibilities of club culture. Her latterday output has stuttered somewhat, but for Madame X the stars have aligned with Madonna’s Pinterest mood board once again. There are hot climates and a piratical eye-patch; shape-shifting to the sounds of the Portuguese diaspora, trap-pop and reggeaton.

It helps, of course, that she self-quotes as much as she soaks up. Is Latin pop in vogue? Don’t mind if Madonna seizes upon it. Medellín, the first track from Madonna’s 14th studio album, arrived like La Isla Bonita on steroids: with Madonna in a lather of faith and lust, exercising her long-held fascination with all things Latinate and in sync with a pop mood attuned to the other Americas. A further hook-up with Colombian star Maluma lurks further down this generous tracklisting: Bitch, I’m Loca flirts with reggaeton and Maluma himself, who plays a delivery man instructed by Madonna to “put it inside”. (Note the title: Bitch, I’m Madonna, remixed; throughout the album, you’ll find Madonna saying a “little prayer” as she did on Like A Prayer (1989), or on her knees “like a virgin”.)

This is an album whose most memorable songs are definitely its strangest

Colombia is a red herring, however. The songs that became Madame X actually came together during Madonna’s two years in Portugal, where she decamped in 2017 when her son David enrolled in Benfica’s football academy. Madonna absorbed the local sounds with more of a mature, simpatico rather than asset-stripping eye.

One lively Portuguese-diaspora tune, Faz Gostoso, makes a pitstop in Brazil, featuring Brazilian singer Anitta. Most “world” of all, however, are the sounds of batuque on a track called Batuka, a ceremonial good-time music of the Cabo Verde islands. Batuka finds Portugal’s Orquestra de Batukadeiras – women from Cabo Verde – helping out on a spiritual call-and-response track about overcoming adversity. There’s a cute video on their Facebook page of Madonna drumming. Add to this a Diplo reggae production, Future, on which Madonna plays at being Santigold, and the hot-climate half of this album adds up to considerably more than the sum of its parts: a polyglot party that feels spontaneous, an internationalism that feels earned, not tokenistic.

Naturally, this Madonna album has to respond to other major trends in US pop. Her selection of guests has an eye on hip-hop heat levels, rather than actual chemistry, calling on Quavo from Migos on Future, and Swae Lee from Rae Sremmurd on Crave. Their performances aren’t quite as game as Maluma’s. To say that the former sounds like a track that might have been done by Ariana Grande isn’t a negative, though: here, Madonna pulls off contemporary R&B-leaning pop with no obvious missteps.

The meat of the album, however, lies elsewhere. Hidden away in the lyrics to Batuka are topical allusions: “Get that old man/ Put him in a jail.” Quite apart from the many Spanish and Portuguese passages, Madame X is littered with whispered, rapped or digitally cloaked lyrics. It is a political offering – the Eurovision palaver, where Madonna hamfistedly tried to engineer peace in the Middle East, was a foreshadowing – but one in which Madonna’s meanings often perform a kind of seven-veil dance.

Easiest to understand is Killers Who Are Partying, a 21st-century digital fado on which Madonna allies herself with the dispossessed and marginalised: virtue signalling, with trap beats on. It’s sanctimonious, coming from a first-world millionaire, but she sings it like she believes it.

Often, she obfuscates, but just intriguingly enough. A snippet of Florida school-shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez’s “We call BS” speech begins one song, I Rise. It follows, therefore, that a song called God Control is probably about gun control, as well as democracy and the state of the US. “This is your wake-up call!” warns Madonna, before the whole thing is bathed in glitterball disco and topped off with a schoolyard sing-song rap about how Madonna doesn’t take drugs. It sounds, weirdly, like Daft Punk.

This is an album whose most memorable songs are definitely its strangest. Most ambitious of all perhaps is Dark Ballet, a long concept-song about Joan of Arc in which the lyricism of the piano lines startles. Madonna herself is heavily Auto-tuned, mumbling stuff about being a witch; she seems to blow on the flames of a pyre.

You get the feeling that Madonna identifies with the French martyr. She spends a lot of Madame X weighing up whether she is crazy, or lost, concluding quite the opposite. “I wasn’t lost,” she sings on Extreme Occident, on the deluxe edition. Killers Who Are Partying bears many declarations, but perhaps the most relevant one is about Madonna herself. “I know what I am and I know what I’m not,” she sings. Even more tellingly, I Don’t Search, I Find puts a full stop on popstar neediness. “Finally, enough love,” she sings.

The whole Madame X conceit – an international woman of mystery – dissipates quickly as this unexpectedly engrossing album goes on. Madame Xis certainly a fluid album, but one tempered by Madonna’s solid confidence in her own aesthetic decisions.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/08/madonna-madame-x-review-splendidly-bizarre-return-to-form

[DavieX 330]

And another great review:

Madame X hits you instantly with its vitality and variety, its omnivorous hunger

 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-7108089/Madame-X-Madonna-hits-instantly-vitality-variety-omnivorous-hunger.html

 

[simbiosis 411]

All this acclaim is incredible!  Since the start of this era, I got the feeling that that this would be another career defining album, and I wasn't wrong! 

[Hades 27,980]

80+ seems realistic if those high scores keep coming.

[DavieX 330]

1 hour ago, Hades said:

80+ seems realistic if those high scores keep coming.

Oh Pitchfork are going to be soo negative like always althought they gave "medellin" a good review.   They distroyed ARTPOP when i came out.

[Hades 27,980]

Updated the op. Score is up to 79/100.

[DavieX 330]

On 6/5/2019 at 4:29 PM, metalguru said:

Madonna's albums are always getting good reviews... Even Rebel Heart pulled some very good ones... Why?

Because all these journalist are 40 something Maddy fans. 

WOW  the ignorance, the agesim, the fumes 

[Hades 27,980]

                                                                                      SLANT MAG

                                                                                        4/5 STARS

The album is the work of an artist reawakened, and one who’s got something to say

''Madame X plays like a musical memoir, sometimes literally: “I came from the Midwest/Then I went to the Far East/I tried to discover my own identity,” Madonna sings on the Eastern-inflected “Extreme Occident,” referencing her rise to fame and spiritual awakening, famously documented on her 1998 album Ray of Light. A multi-part suite that shifts abruptly from electro-pop dirge to classical ballet and back again, “Dark Ballet” is a Kafkaesque treatise on faith and her lifelong crusade against the patriarchal forces of religion, gender, and celebrity—an existential battle echoed in the Jean-Paul Sartre-quoting closing track “I Rise.”

The album’s autobiography is also conveyed sonically: It’s a thrill to hear Madonna singing over a ‘90s house beat on the smoldering “I Don’t Search I Find.” But despite its ballroom strings, finger-snaps, and throaty spoken-word bridge, comparing it to “Vogue” or “Erotica” would be too easy. This isn’t a song so much as a mood. It’s downstairs music, the distant bassline rumbling beneath your feet as you slip into a bathroom stall for a quick bump or ****.

Madonna has a reputation for being a trendsetter, but her true talent lies in bending those trends to her will, twisting them around until they’re barely recognizable, and creating something entirely new. The album’s pièce de résistance, at least in that regard, is the six-minute “God Control,” which begins with Madonna conjuring the spirit and disaffected monotone of Kurt Cobain—“I think I understand why people get a gun/I think I understand why we all give up,” she sings through clenched teeth—before the whole thing implodes into a euphoric, densely layered samba-disco-gospel mash-up. Throughout the song, Madonna’s vocals alternate between Auto-Tuned belting, urgent whispers, and Tom Tom Club-style rapping as she takes on the gaslight industrial complex and so-called political reformers. On paper, it might sound like the ingredients for a musical Hindenburg, but—somewhere around the midpoint, when she declares, “It’s a con, it’s a hustle, it’s a weird kind of energy!”—it all coheres into the most exhilaratingly batshit thing she’s done in years''

READ MORE HERE: https://www.slantmagazine.com/music/review-madonna-madame-x-is-a-fearless-eccentric-musical-memoir/

[LouiseVeronica 426]

Holy **** at the Slant review!!!

[Andreu 37,216]

Why should we believe a newspaper that says Dark Ballet has dubstep in it

[Hades 27,980]

Only 2 mixed reviews so far. The rest are positive although Pitchfork won't be a soft reviewer.

[Chromatislaps 34,558]

I'm kind of obsessed with Dark Ballet.  I can't wait for the full album