flood

Well, now I only produce Killers and Placebo! :)

For me, their most beautiful album, the most elegant, the best played and sung... I would have also mentioned Enough and the title track among the most successful pieces, a beautiful review anyway, which finally treats this underrated band in a serious and in-depth manner.

It is indeed Madonna's least successful album (though not as bad as it's often described), but in my opinion, it’s precisely those electronic tracks that save it, perhaps because I've always found Madonna as a committed folk singer to be quite unbelievable... I don’t think Mirwais is a wrong musician/producer at all (on the contrary, his Production was a very interesting album), it’s Madonna's fault for not being able (twice) to utilize him optimally for the entire duration of an album.

Well, to each their own. For example, I will never understand the 5 stars that are usually given to The Lion And The Cobra... stunning as a debut (which showcased her unusual vocal abilities) but still very immature in my opinion and with sounds that have aged rather poorly! I would have given Universal Mother (if I could) a 4.5, but since that's not possible, I preferred to round up to "reward" it for the fact that only a few people tend to appreciate it.

@zarboris: thank you for giving me the inspiration! As for the reggae cover album, I can’t review it primarily because I don’t own it (even though I’ve listened to it a few times) and also because reggae isn’t a genre I know well or feel particularly passionate about... I wouldn’t be able to fairly judge or describe an album like that without knowing the original versions! I hope someone else covers it; who knows, it might encourage me to buy it!

Well, hanging out with Prince is both a duty... and an immense pleasure! :)
However, in my opinion, and I say this as one of his biggest fans, if Nothing Compares 2U turned out so well, the merit is not only due to Prince's beautiful melody but also to O'Connor's superlative vocal performance and, above all, the production and arrangement of the piece (all her doing) which are quite different from the original version (I think by Vanity 6 or another protégée of Prince) but also from the heavy reinterpretation he did in '92.
In short, O'Connor undeniably made that piece her own... but it’s also true that it isn’t very representative of her work; she never really tried (purposely!?) to replicate it, and she has rarely returned to such almost orchestral openings, preferring instead ballads arranged in a much more acoustic-traditional way or, on the flip side, much more electronic.
It’s hard to tell if that piece is more "hated" by her or by him ahaha.

Yes, it has already come out! ;)

@zarboris2: look, I specifically dedicated the first listens (quite a few) only to the London Sessions to avoid this "confusion," and only after I had thoroughly memorized all the tracks and melodies did I move on to their acoustic version. In this way, I have to say it was less distracting and easier to grasp. It seems that the album was initially meant to be solely electric, but then O'Connor, after performing the songs in acoustic version during the last series of concerts last year, found herself uncertain about which version was better (with a preference, however, for the Dublin Sessions).

Unfortunately, for some time now, O'Connor's albums have been released a bit quietly, both because they are distributed by independent labels and undoubtedly also due to her outspokenness, which has made her less popular with the media (but she seems to not care as usual). Of course, the type of music she offers is certainly not suitable for Italian radio or music TV (busy playing nonsense), but it saddens me to see how even on the internet, on many sites dedicated to less "visible" music, she is still somewhat snubbed or at least not widely known, as if it has been proclaimed that she is no longer fashionable, that after those two famous singles, there’s no point in knowing more about her and delving into her fascinating, albeit uneven, musical journey... perhaps it’s no longer "cool" to listen to her, what a shame.

I approached this album with a bit of skepticism and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Fun, unpredictable, very refined... Pink Cigarette is truly a great track.