Geese Get Bluesier, Proggier, Dancier, Slicker, Rougher, Weirder, Better on '3D Country'Īngels opens with another overture that features Mike Dean, Chris’ co-producer on the album, which cuts back to his mother. Chris sings, “See me/Hear me/Feel me” (a not-so-disguised nod to the Who) and “If an angel in silence/Decided just to free me/Could I get that sweet power?” The song is a moment of euphoria. (Madonna talks almost in monotone here and there throughout the album but always sounds like herself.) Eventually, the experimentalism collapses into a straightforward pop song. The themes culminate in the third act’s six-minute “Lick the Light Out,” which features Madonna in an unusual guest appearance, portraying the narrator/angel/surrogate mother Big Eye, speaking about inhabiting Chris’s whole being over diffuse psychedelic sounds. Much of the libretto deals with processing the loss of his mother, who died in April 2019, his belief in angels, and the loneliness that comes with defining his masculine identity. For the album, he drew inspiration from Tony Kushner’s lauded 1990s play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, as well as rock operas like Tommy. While all those works found Chris making sense of earthly matters, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love petitions the heavens.
On 2018’s Chris, he played further with gender roles on the flawless pop song, “Girlfriend,” and on 2020’s La Vita Nuova EP, he perfectly captured the introspective loneliness of Covid lockdowns on “People, I’ve Been Sad.” But he changed his musical aesthetic on last year’s Redcar les Adorables Étoiles (Prologue) with free-flowing, sprawling moments of pop and psychedelia as he sang about embracing his masculinity ostensibly setting up Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. On his 2014 debut, Chaleur Humaine (released in English as Christine and the Queens), he wrote concise, R&B-leaning pop songs like “Christine” ( “Tilted” in English) that showed his skill for sharp hooks, squeezed vocals, and brainy lyrics, but he also sang “I am a man now” on the album’s “iT,” foreshadowing the roles gender and change would play in his art. In many ways, the album feels like the work of art Chris has been trying to make his entire career. The album is a lot to take in, but the depth of emotion, musical ingenuity, and the psychodrama that Chris pours into each track makes the hefty time commitment a worthwhile sonic journey. On the album, the French artist (let’s call him Chris for simplicity) summons celestial bodies, pays tribute to his late mother, flirts with 070 Shake, navigates acid-rock and dubby detours, samples Marvin Gaye and Pachelbel’s canon, and divines some of the catchiest melodies of his career. It takes 97 minutes to listen to Christine and the Queens’ moving, three-act pop opera, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, but you need months to understand it fully.
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