Madonna review, Madame X: An intriguing, often brilliant, occasionally awful album

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “I Don’t Search I Find” is a cross between Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”, a Nineties house track, and an orchestral Bond song. “People tell me to shut my mouth, that I might get burnt,” she sings on “Dark Ballet” – surely a nod to the shock and horror she has elicited while blazing a trail through pop for the past four decades – “Keep your beautiful lies/ ’Cause I’m not concerned.” Mostly, though, the record is less a personal riposte than a political one. On “God Control”, clearly an attack on America’s feeble gun-control laws, she sings, sounding as though her jaw is firmly clenched, “When they talk reforms it makes me laugh, they pretend to help, it makes me laugh.” On “Batuka”, a rabble-rousing chant buoyed by the Batukadeiras, she decrees, “Get that old man, put him in a jail, where he can’t stop us, where he can’t hurt us.” It’s not hard to imagine who that old man might be. She does so quite literally on the risibly misjudged “Killers Who Are Partying”, on which she declares, that faux-English accent bubbling dangerously to the surface, “I will be gay if the gay are burnt/ I’ll be Africa if Africa is shot down … I’ll be Islam if Islam is hated … I’ll be Native Indian if the Indian has been taken.” It’s well-intentioned, but being an ally doesn’t quite work like that.