To come from an artist whose hazy daydream of a debut album was titled Dopamine and covered by a voyeuristic photograph of a woman's bare legs, Blue Madonna seems to be a depressive title that represents a bit of a digression in attitude for BØRNS. His humid ecstasy fizzled as the mystery woman walked away and his nomadic rocker dreams unfolded, leaving him to pool out into a velvety state of loneliness and turmoil as he yearns from afar for just about everything from a new beautiful woman to immortality.
Per its title’s implications, Blue Madonna dismantles the constant euphoria of Dopamine to make way for a somber outlook on life. The end product's idiosyncrasies – muffled filters, cosmic production, BØRNS' nasal-toned falsetto – dress up a sad guy in a psychedelic-lite outfit. He often resides in that fragile falsetto as the tracks swirl beneath him, and though it serves him well on tracks like “Sweet Dreams" and "Supernatural," it can also paint him as a melodically grounded, equally troubled Tame Impala runoff on the very same tracks.
A sitar line adds character to “We Don’t Care,” though it is chucked before a sorely underdeveloped chorus, and more than anything, his voice sounds painfully stretched while he wails into his uppermost register on lead single “Faded Heart.” But his more refined hooks warm to boil and wrap themselves around the listener, like when he and his label-mate and mirror-image Lana Del Rey plead together over “God Save Our Young Blood” or when “I Don’t Want U Back” shakes below BØRNS’ milky, Auto-Tuned flutters.
This record re-spools the androgynous allure of his first one into something more thematically ambitious – but perhaps too ambitious for his glamorous metaphors and glossy sweet nothings. Per his interviews and Genius lyric annotations, he clings to meta conversational cornerstones in search of answers to very large unknowns. And while this record is just as capable of being hypnotizing in musical composition, it's when listeners emerge from the spell that they realize that the tunes are beautiful distractions – not answers – to his problems.
Blue Madonna is out now under Interscope Records.
Per its title’s implications, Blue Madonna dismantles the constant euphoria of Dopamine to make way for a somber outlook on life. The end product's idiosyncrasies – muffled filters, cosmic production, BØRNS' nasal-toned falsetto – dress up a sad guy in a psychedelic-lite outfit. He often resides in that fragile falsetto as the tracks swirl beneath him, and though it serves him well on tracks like “Sweet Dreams" and "Supernatural," it can also paint him as a melodically grounded, equally troubled Tame Impala runoff on the very same tracks.
A sitar line adds character to “We Don’t Care,” though it is chucked before a sorely underdeveloped chorus, and more than anything, his voice sounds painfully stretched while he wails into his uppermost register on lead single “Faded Heart.” But his more refined hooks warm to boil and wrap themselves around the listener, like when he and his label-mate and mirror-image Lana Del Rey plead together over “God Save Our Young Blood” or when “I Don’t Want U Back” shakes below BØRNS’ milky, Auto-Tuned flutters.
This record re-spools the androgynous allure of his first one into something more thematically ambitious – but perhaps too ambitious for his glamorous metaphors and glossy sweet nothings. Per his interviews and Genius lyric annotations, he clings to meta conversational cornerstones in search of answers to very large unknowns. And while this record is just as capable of being hypnotizing in musical composition, it's when listeners emerge from the spell that they realize that the tunes are beautiful distractions – not answers – to his problems.
Blue Madonna is out now under Interscope Records.
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