Chris from Christine and the Queens first met Madonna in 2015, when he was pulled on stage in Paris during a performance of her song Unapologetic Bitch for a dance and, surprisingly, to be unapologetically spanked by the Queen of Pop. The union was pre-planned but still looked more like one of those moments where a fan gets plucked from the audience rather than a meeting of shining stars, even though Madonna had acknowledged the influence of Chris’s choreography on some of her work.
Well now it’s Madonna who has the bit part on the fourth Christine and the Queens album, and rather than increasing this wild collection’s pop appeal, her three cameos only add to the weirdness. Instead of singing, she provides the disembodied voice of a character called “Big Eye”, saying: “Do you suffer from loneliness? This is the voice of the big simulation,” on I Met an Angel, among other hard to follow speeches.
Yes, this is a concept album, and a sprawling one, with 20 songs including an 11-minute rumble of anguish called Track 10 (which is actually track seven). It comes accompanied by a thousand-word poem and a story inspired in part by Tony Kushner’s seven-and-a-half hour play about the AIDS crisis, Angels in America, and partly by the death of Chris’s mother.
On Full of Life, it adapts one of the most loved and recognisable tunes in all music – Pachelbel’s Canon, last heard on a Maroon 5 single – but it also features crashing beats, electronic squeals and guttural howls on Let Me Touch You Once.
We’re a long way from the smooth, sophisticated electronic pop of Chaleur Humaine, the debut album that made him a huge star, especially in France. On a frequently inaccessible collection released just seven months ago, Redcar les adorables étoiles, he made clear that he was now making music for art, not the charts. Today his curation of the Southbank’s Meltdown festival begins, following in the footsteps of serious artists such as Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and Nick Cave.
These songs include some passages that are even harder to digest than those on the last album, but this time, it’s impossible not to admire the uncompromising sonic boldness. There are also songs of breathtaking beauty, including the lighter than air Marvin Descending and the unadorned piano ballad Flowery Days. It’s a lot to take in, more than enough to overshadow Madonna, and frequently extraordinary.
