I've spent some time as a narcissist

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

15/03/15 : Rebel Heart - Madonna


Ordinarily, I would have expected this to be rubbish but her '05 offering was surprisingly bearable, so I'm going in with a pleasantly open mind.

Hmmm - I'm not sure what I thought of this. She's trying some new stuff with the kids and whilst none of it is horrible, as an album it all feels a bit disconnected and scattershot. There is also an unfortunate suspicion that the kids are making Grandma say swear words for shits and giggles - which they'd obviously deny strenuously if challenged (whilst totally failing to keep a straight face). But then again, Grandma does have form for being a bit controversial, so maybe it's her making the kids misbehave - either way it did get a bit tiresome (74 minutes for the deluxe version). But when she does some proper singing (as opposed to talking about sex or drugs), she's still got a nice voice - I actually liked "Messiah" and "Rebel Heart" which were the last two tracks.

We're at #2 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of a twelve week run. The rest of the top five are Sam (his last week at #1 in his 42nd week, only one of which was spent outside the top five), Ed, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds (which I'm going to have to suffer soon) and George Ezra and we have one more new entry in the top ten for Rebecca Ferguson (#7).

Wikipedia has the most we've seen on any album this year (650 milliPeppers) and it tells us loads of stuff we really don't need to know. It tells us that it's her thirteenth album and that "working with many collaborators posed problems for Madonna in keeping a cohesive sound and creative direction for the album". And boy were there a wide variety of collaborators here - Nicki Minaj, Chance The Rapper, Nas, Mike Tyson, Alicia Keys, Avicii, Diplo, Kanye West and Travis Scott are the names I recognise but there are a gazillion others as well, with 32 different songwriters involved. 

Critically, most people were nice enough about it, although there was more than a hint of "well, it's better than most of the shit she's put out recently" - amusingly, NME hated it telling us that "trite self-empowerment anthem 'Iconic' informs us that there's only two letters difference between Icon and I Can't. Sadly, there are also two letters between class and ass". Commercially, it did better than you might expect from someone whose relevance was definitely on the wane, getting to #1 in fourteen countries and #2 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga and, errr, Jeff McPherson (nope - me neither!). I can't fault Madonna for trying here and there were some decent bits, but it certainly doesn't work as a whole album and a lot of the newer stuff she tried didn't really work either.

08/03/15 - Bang average
22/03/15 - Perfectly pleasant

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