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"Rebel Heart" Reviews [continued] - thread 2


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I don't understand reviews that say " It's the best record Madonna has made in the past 10 years . 6/10 ."

That's just so anal and stupid .

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I don't understand reviews that say " It's the best record Madonna has made in the past 10 years . 6/10 ."

That's just so anal and stupid .

Agreed. It's like they're hedging or something, to cover themselves when looking back on the review at some point in the future.

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Because they don't wanna give her the credit she deserves.

How can EW say it's the best in 10 years yet give it a B lol

They will be sucking this album's dick and comparing it to whatever she's releasing in 10 years. Just like how Confessions is a masterpiece of pop now in some critic circles yet where were all the 5/5 stars for it then?

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It angers me too because it's such basic and ignorant criticism.

But as I pointed out above, it's basically a critical success. And the writers I respect the most like Jim Farber, Elysa Gardner, and Joe Levy have all given praise. And the Time magazine and Boston Globe reviews are downright phenomenal.

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The usual back handed compliments. They praise her, but then they have to end with the criticism. They hold her to an extremely high standard, don't they? And I don't like how they always compare her to Bjork or Grace Jones. She's her own person!! I'm tired of the whole desperate thing too.

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At least the grade (7/10) matches the write up, unlike some of the others...

True. If anything with all of the criticisms they made, you would think the grade would be lower.

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True. If anything with all of the criticisms they made, you would think the grade would be lower.

I know! Then that guy from Pretty Much Amazing praises 12 tracks, says four others are ok, but gives a C+ due to a handful of tracks :laugh:

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Paste Magazine: 7.6/10

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/03/madonna-rebel-heart-review.html

The Line of Best Fit: 6.5/10

http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/madonna-rebel-heart

Both count for Metacritic

Metascore so far: 70/100 out of 25 reviews

Thank you! I was hoping for Paste review but didn't think they would!

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Guest HaveASit

The fact that at least 25 critics (including some very snobbish sites) are reviewing her work just proves how much people from the art camp are interested on her music.

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Guest PRPapi

I really disliked this line from "TheLineOfBestFIt":

“Heartbreak City” encapsulates the beauty she is capable of, while “Ghost Town” is exactly the sort of song Madonna should be making: a slinky electro-ballad."

It's supposed to be a compliment. But, how arrogant! Who the hell does this nobody, Tom Hocknell, think he is to suggest he knows best what Madonna should and shouldn't be doing, or what her music should and shouldn't sound like? With SUCH a varied and expansive back catalogue featuring all sorts of genres, there is NO song Madonna SHOULD do. She does what she does. Her art comes out from what she feels. Her music sounds however it is originally sounding in her heart. That was a very ingnorant and arrogant comment, even if it was meant as - faint - praise.

However, I do like the line that follows - LOL:

"It’s magnificent, and as the music falls away like melted glacier, her voice almost cracks in the fragile accapella: “when it falls down, I’ll be your fire when the lights go out”. It’s noble, contemporary and utterly affecting; another reason why pop music was invented."

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Not a review, but the NY Times ran this article by the Associated Press yesterday in which they say RH is "one of her most critically acclaimed efforts in years." They then reference Time, LA Times, and USA Today reviews.

Good, free promo!

http://mobile.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/03/11/arts/ap-us-music-madonna.html?_r=0&referrer=

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Not a review, but the NY Times ran this article by the Associated Press yesterday in which they say RH is "one of her most critically acclaimed efforts in years." They then reference Time, LA Times, and USA Today reviews.

Good, free promo!

http://mobile.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/03/11/arts/ap-us-music-madonna.html?_r=0&referrer=

Awesome!

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Half of these reviewers show their ignorance in matters relating to Madonna. They are too obsessed with thinking that what is now is what is important. Madonna transcends eras. If you hear both Howard Stern and Larry Flick speak of the album, they speak within a context of her greater picture and they both state the album is an opus...A journey that you have to listen to in full. If anyone is finding the album disjointed or "messy' it is purely because the culture we live in today is undefined and haphazard and therefore has no context. That is not Madonna's fault and they will come to realize how stupid the qualifications are with a little hindsight. And I am talking months, not years,

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“Joan of Arc” sounds like the sonically generic soul-searching of Katy Perry’s Prism

“Iconic” would sound incredible as a Minaj track

“Ghosttown,” one of the album’s best and most vulnerable tracks, embraces a post-Lorde/Drake flood of spacious electronics in pop

:popcorn2:

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Pitchfork just gave it a 5.1

And guess what? The review is essentially full of praise and the recognition that it's the reviewer who can't get over "Madonna" in order to review Madonna. This is why I've stopped reading most of their reviews a couple of years ago.

Pasting it here so you don't give them the click ;)

It’s difficult to take Madonna at face value. She is on her third generation of pop iconhood, after all, and her work comes freighted with decades of discussions about sexuality, appropriation, and whether what she is doing is "shocking" or "fake" or "appropriate." In the run-up to Rebel Heart, a series of bad-press flare-ups—myriad Instagram-basedcontroversies, comparing her album leak to rape—suggested that maybe Madonna had slipped from our reality entirely. Yet, the surprise of Rebel Heart, her 13th album, is its groundedness, its centering of the Real Madonna in the mix.

In a way, Rebel Heart fits squarely into a growing canon that also includes Björk’s Vulnicura,Kim Gordon’s new memoir and the autobiography of Slits guitarist Viv Albertine: female artists of a certain age making mature, candid work about divorce, and the rediscovery of the artistic self that follows in the wake of the rupture of their domestic life. Rebel Heart, likeVulnicura, digs in on the vertiginous aftermath (most spectacularly on "Living for Love" and "HeartBreakCity"), and finds steadiness in the pure loves of children, the bedrock of self, and spiritualism. As is traditional Madonna™, her lyrics reach for top-shelf Catholicism, conflating spiritual and sexual salvation in a way that never makes entirely clear whether the supplication is being offered at the foot of Christ or a bedmate.

On the absolution-seeking "Devil Pray", she sings about the futility of escaping pain and recites a garbage head’s shopping list of street drugs that offer brief relief—including, but not limited to, sniffing glue. As she chants "Save my soul/ Devil’s here to fool ya" a bed of throaty, orgasmic samples rises in the mix, a hundred tiny Madonna-voices in coital abyss. It is a strange, tender, comical thing, this Madonna song that cites huffing and invokes the presence of "Lucifer." But ultimately, it’s a boring stadium-throb lite-EDM song about seeking sobriety and/or big-G God. It’s also a Madonna-doing-Madonna cliche, which is too often the downfall of Rebel Heart.

The good news is that most of the time, Madonna-doing-Madonna seems in on the joke. There’s the masterfully campy "Bitch I’m Madonna", and then the 50 Shades of What-the-Actual-Fuck of "S.E.X.", which goes from trad break-you-off/come-inside talk to mentions of "chopsticks," a "dental chair," a "golden shower" and raw meat as erotic objects in a voice that sounds like she’s calling on her Creepy Frog phone while wearing a zipped fetish mask. On "Holy Water" she draws a comparison reminiscent of Lana Del Rey and Pepsi-Cola.

The deep production team on Rebel Heart—Ariel Rechtshaid and Diplo in particular—have previously done work referencing classic '80s Madonna, and seemingly have a good sense of what suits her voice and still-evolving mature-era aesthetic. The soulful diva house of "Living for Love" sounds like it should have been the single off the Mary J. Blige London Sessionsalbum, complete with celestial gospel chorus and piano 8s. It kicks off the album and serves as its thesis—Madonna as triumphant (yet vulnerable) phoenix from the flame, seeking good love and God, raving in the dawn after the darkness. Much of the 14-track domestic commercial version (as well as crushingly long 25-track super deluxe version) mines the same territory.

When she’s not hammering self-help maxims in the breakup zone, she is ordering the pop cosmos around her, much like she’s been doing since approximately 1985. "Bitch I’m Madonna" is a fantastic argument that the A. G. Cook, Nicki Minaj, Diplo & Madonna album should come out, like, tomorrow and save everyone’s summer. It’s corny and glorious, its Nicki verse the most energizing 26 seconds of the album—and it’s also a convincing plea for big-tent EDM to get weird. On the surface it’s essentially the most artful Kesha song anyone’s ever made, but grows progressively more warped and bubblegum until it falls apart amid seizing saw synths. It’s Madonna as cartoon diva, but then it’s piggybacked by the pained ballad flipside: On "Joan of Arc" she opens up, as much as any ultra famous pop performer can in four minutes, about how hard it is to be the public Madonna, followed by paparazzi and dissected by trolls online. "Just hold me while I cry my eyes out," she sings.

It’s a curious cocktail, one that makes it seem like she is actively taking on the mantle of What Madonna Means To Us In 2015. Rebel Heart finds her recoiling and resigning from it, refusing it, fucking with us, examining her own history and playfully crushing it under her boot heel. Yet, while some songs never quite make their point, others drill down on bad ones. The cringe-inducing "Body Shop"—wherein Madonna takes a body-as-a-car metaphor into mortifying territory that makes you wish for an Auto Wrecker: "You can polish the headlights/ You can smooth out the fender." (Bon Scott is probably spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.) With songs like that sandwiched between unabashed bangers and tenderhearted treacle, and constant codeswitching from Madonna the character to Madonna the human being, Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses. As valiantly as the album tries, it’s hard to hit reset on the Madonna we’ve known and loved, after 30 years of campaigning for our hearts and minds.

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Pitchfork review summary:

Most songs are great and fun and essentially Madonna, but Devil Pray and Body Shop are cringe worthy, and the concept of the album is confusing! 5.1!

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