Adriano Bernard

"Mer Girl", we finally reach the end of the album: the usual beginning with the difference that it is also more boring and monotonous than usual, with Madonna messing around between the whiniest Elisa and the most tedious monotonous post-rock. The cicca tries, but to do post-rock you need class and you need content. Madonna has less than zero content and has always had it. The problem is that what should have been an intro becomes the song itself, as Madonna repeats it for 5 incredibly boring minutes. Nevertheless, it remains a fairly decent episode compared to the previous songs, which were absolutely sleep-inducing. In conclusion, this is the same old Madonna album: simply, the production made sure that the arrangements were very slick and very "classy," but the content was the usual flat zero. I give this album a 2 for Madonna's skill in fooling us again, and this time even better than usual.

And finally we arrive at "Frozen," the only good track on the album: an orchestra of violins and a layer of electronic sounds, blended with Madonna's cold and distant voice, enchant us with a chorus that is a mix between Enya and Buddha Bar, a chorus that she allows herself to repeat for a full six and a half minutes. But since it’s the only acceptable song on the album, she wants to stretch it out to delay the torture of the other 4 crappy songs that await us, which seems fair enough. We move to the piece "The Power Of Goodbye," with an epic and semi-divine intro that promises great things. Great things that obviously never come, since the chorus is a mix between an Enya ballad and church hymns. "To Have And Not to Hold" has the usual fake sophisticated ambient intro that tricks no one, as she starts singing about saying goodbye to any hope after just a few seconds. Apparently, Madonna had exhausted her great ideas, since the lyrics in the chorus are practically nonexistent as she sings "Papparappapapa, What Can I Do?". Or it could be a form of reconnection to childhood, to the sounds emitted by infants. Who knows, we will remain in oblivion for this philosophical choice of the papparapappappa.... But let's move on to "Little Star," another attempt by Madonna to connect with children. The music is a faded photocopy of the rest of the album, except perhaps for the stroke of luck that happens around three minutes in, when a new age background starts that recalls the best of Mike Oldfield in "Songs Of the Distant Heart."

"Notting Really Matters" starts in the usual way, with at least a questionable sentence: "When I was very Young..." (oh dear, let’s just say it, you were young a long, long, long time ago and even then you were a mess, just imagine now!). As for the song, the intro might deceive us and give us hope, but the chorus comes in right on time to ruin it all: bland, uninspired, and above all, absolutely the same as the choruses of previous songs. But here comes the trick: a very "left-handed" piano scale that should mislead us and convince us that the piece is actually experimental.
With "Sky fits Heaven," our Luisa tries again with the disorienting/celestial dream pop: she wants to give us the feeling of a freefall parachute jump, and she succeeds: too bad that once the chorus ends the parachute breaks and we plummet, given the absolutely pathetic continuation of the track. In short, a piece that doesn’t stand up: it wobbles, as the only decent part is the chorus. In the pitiful "Shanti/Ashtangi," she tries once more to wink at world music: here she sings in an unknown but very mystical and evocative language, and then there are the drums, oh yes, and listen, there are also tribal voices in the background, oh magnificent, now that’s a great thing, that really breaks the bones.

I must say that the third track has a rather nice acoustic guitar intro, which unfortunately gets swept away by a rather clichéd and poor-quality disco beat. The chorus of this song is nothing short of disgusting. The nothing of nothing: zero ideas, zero reworking, zero everything. If the previous track was zero, with "Candy perfume girl" it plunges below zero: a non-melodic chorus that doesn’t even sound like a chorus; at one point the Madonna even tries to create some noise as a background but with zero results...
"Skin" is one of the more decent pieces of the album because while the song itself is terrible, it has a chorus that borrows a bit from dream pop and therefore hypnotizes (a little, but better than nothing). As a finale, Madonna surprises us all with one of her flashes of genius: adding an electro-push with some African-sounding filters. Yes, because she’s a "World" girl, appreciating all cultures, you know...

Encouraged by the voices proclaiming it as the musical "redemption" of Ciccone, I downloaded this album: it is clearly better than all of Madonna's other albums, but it still remains a commercial and trivial operation. The first track, "Drowned World..." has an ambient beginning that reminds me of Sigur Rós, with a deep voice speaking, so the piece feels more like a conceived experimental work… The song is simply any old Madonna tune, neither here nor there, stripped of the dance rhythm and interpreted in a "calm-acoustic-ambient-mystical" key. In short, compared to the average Madonna, it’s not a complete waste, but its association with ambient atmospheres is simply ridiculous; it truly deceives no one (even though it seems someone has indeed fallen for it). The second track, "Swim," with its vaguely post-rock experimental flavor, introduces this piece, making us hope for the famous redemption: then immediately Madonna starts to sing and post-rock goes to hell; it's a bland, dull, trivial, commercial piece without any soul. At the very least, it's pathetic.

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Hiver, don't listen to our floydman, he’s a fascist :-). Are they perhaps the him deprived of the background of metal riffs? From the way you talk about them, I think of them :-)))

RockOne is precisely on the song "EveryDay" that my vote is based, can you believe it... These are the poor man's nephews of Guns... if they were to be turned in their graves.

Down with the score for the album...

No, I can't actually stand AOR with melodic hard rock. They nullify all the substance of hard rock, flatten it out, and above all reduce it to a Bon Jovi-style catchy tune. The whole thing (in the album in question, I believe) is accompanied by annoyingly epic/fantasy atmospheres... Maybe I exaggerated with the 1; if I give 1 to this one, I should give zero to Vanadium and -1 to Transatlantic and Dream Theater (ZERO content)... The only AOR that I can tolerate is the first song from Boston's first album :-)))) I liked the review, though. Bye.