Jump to content

Bat-Fan

Elitists
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,876

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Bat-Fan

    MADAME X: official reviews are in: MADAME X is a hit with the critics!

    in ARCHIVE - The MADAME X Forum

    Posted

    43 minutes ago, Gabriel Ciccone said:

    The Tropicalist movement brought a number of innovations to the Brazilian cultural scene in the late 1960s. The movement was, in a sense, a right of the obviously militant population, that the country's political situation was a year of dictatorship and had a melody as a great medium of communication.

    The letters were invented, introducing games of language, approaching the poetry of concretists. The messages were coded, requiring a certain cultural baggage to be understood. Caetano Veloso's "Alegria, Alegria" doesn´t have an obvious meaning, but carries with it a stronger memory of the youth of the 60s, a torment with the violence of the dictatorship and a desire to innovate, to break barriers.

    They were characterized by excess, colorful clothes, long hair and added various musical influences. The era was to shock, through performances characterized by aesthetic violence, to protest against well-behaved Brazilian music. Influenced by the counterculture, they took over the language of parody and debauchery. Tropicalists transformed Brazilian popular music, being great exponents of Brazilian avant-garde art.

    Musically, tropicalism is a mixture of culture, psychological rock, erudite music, popular culture, among others, giving an account of various manifestations of national culture. The sound of the electric guitar coexisted with violins and with the berimbau. It was the rescue of the anthropophagic movement of Oswald de Andrade allied to the roots of the national traditions.

     

    I was hoping Batuka was an upbeat song

    MADAME X: official reviews are in: MADAME X is a hit with the critics!

    in ARCHIVE - The MADAME X Forum

    Posted · Edited by Ven Conmigo
    Info

    Full reviews The Times (UK):

     

    Madonna: Madame X review — probably her boldest album yet

    Will Hodgkinson

    June 4 2019, 12:01am, The Times

    Rating: 4 Stars out of 5 Stars

    Ever since she emerged from New York in the early 1980s, Madonna’s moderate abilities in music, singing and dancing have been more than made up for in searing ambition, an ability to work with the right people at the right time and a brittle form of bravery, with outer toughness masking inner frailty. Now comes probably her boldest, certainly her strangest, album yet. Madame X veers between pop, Latin and clubby dance music, jumps from the personal to the political and is bound together by an exotic, breezy mood that feels strangely intimate, as if she is revealing a hitherto hidden part of her soul. She isn’t really, of course, but she does a good job of pretending she is.

    Dark Ballet, recorded with the French producer Mirwais, throws all of these qualities into one three-part experimental epic. Over piano-led, minor-key pop, Madonna variously tells us that she can dress like a boy or a girl as she wishes, castigates the world for being obsessed with fame and concludes by saying that some unnamed people, at a guess Donald Trump and his team, are naive to think that we aren’t aware of their crimes. At one point she says something indecipherable in a half robot, half Disney princess voice. It is quite a trip.

    Then there is Killers Who Are Partying, on which Madonna goes the full Bono as she identifies with Africa, poor people, exploited children and pretty much everyone else who isn’t a rich, old, golf-playing white man. “I’ll be poor, if the poor are humiliated,” she claims over a touch of Portuguese fado, and although you suspect that she isn’t really about to give up her life as the most successful female pop star yet and wander the Earth as a penniless ascetic, the sentiment is there. “I’ll be Islam if Islam is hated,” she continues. “I’ll be Israel if they’re incarcerated.” World peace through song may be a naive endeavour, as John Lennon found out five decades ago, but this flash of idealism at a time of rising global division is welcome nonetheless.

    There are straightforward pop songs, such as the country-leaning Crave and the English/Portuguese Crazy, but the most captivating moments push the boat out. The Latin-tinged Batuka has a wayward quality reminiscent of Brazil’s late-1960s tropicalia movement and features the unequivocally Trump-bashing line “Get that old man and put him in jail”.

    It wouldn’t be a Madonna album with a bit of overt sexuality and Faz Gostoso (“make it tasty”) pours the sauce over a samba rhythm, while on I Don’t Search I Find she reconnects with her core audience via the medium of high-energy, pumping house music. Finally comes I Rise, an empowerment anthem with a sample of the now-famous speech by the Parkland shooting survivor Emma González.

    MADAME X: official reviews are in: MADAME X is a hit with the critics!

    in ARCHIVE - The MADAME X Forum

    Posted

    1 hour ago, smirnoff_ice said:

    Madge album review

    WITH just ten days to go until her first album in four years, Madame X, anticipation is mounting for Madonna’s return.

    I’m no expert when it comes to the Queen Of Pop so I sent Bizarre’s pop supremo Howell Davies to take a first listen of the full record to see if it lives up to the hype . . .

    Madonna's will release her new album in ten days

    SAY what you like about Madonna – she’s never boring.

    In an industry which is quickly becoming devoid of personality, she has returned with her most diverse and out-there record ever.

    Madame X sees Madge sing in Portuguese on a handful of the tracks including the upbeat Crazy and Bitch, I’m Loca, on which she teams up with Maluma again.

    And she’s as cheeky as ever on the tune, which ends with her telling the Reggaeton star: “You can put it inside.”

    Dark Ballet features a high-octane reimagining of the Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy while she addresses under-fire minority groups in Killers Who Are Partying.

    I Don’t Search I Find harks back to the Nineties with an ambient trance beat, which is totally different from God Control and Come Alive, which feature vocals by Tiffin Children’s Choir, from South West London.

    This collection could easily have felt like a clash of cultures gone too far, but there’s very little she can’t turn her hand to.

    It’s ultra-contemporary, packed with variety and totally unlike anything she has done before.

    Just like she did in 1998 with Ray Of Light, this is Madonna’s reinvention.

    More at The Sun

    Why they say danse of the suger plum fairy, the part from Dark Ballet is Danse des Mirlitons. You know classical music please. 

    Madame X: Discussion (LISTENING PARTY info within)

    in ARCHIVE - The MADAME X Forum

    Posted

    8 minutes ago, Geiger83 said:

    Almost every Madonna album has at least one or two "silly" songs (exceptions IMO are Ray of Light, Music and American Life). I personally don't understand why to put this kind of song on a record, specially when some time later demos leak and we ask why on heaven these unreleased songs weren't chosen. But I simply learned to accept that this is what Madonna does (Jimmy Jimmy, Did you do it, Don't Stop, I love New York, Spanish Lesson, Bday Song, Autotune Baby and many others say hello...while Love won't wait, Your honesty, You'll stay and many many many others cry on the corner 🤣)

    Bday song is the worst... Unlistenable 

    Madame X: Discussion (LISTENING PARTY info within)

    in ARCHIVE - The MADAME X Forum

    Posted

    7 minutes ago, Shane said:

    Well, we only have a couple reviews to go by, so that could change.  I will say that from the moment I read the track list, I just had a feeling that Faz Gostoso and Bitch I’m Loca would be the two tracks that would drag down the critics’ consensus.  All early signs point to the majority of the material being amazing, but she often insists on including one or two fluff type songs that critics don’t like.

    It is a pity the most "latin" tracks are rated lowest. Was looking forward to latin Madonna

×
×
  • Create New...