>The promises of those EPs are not quite kept on the 21-minute album 45 Pounds (2025), an album that seems infatuated with the British New Wave of the early 1980s. The funk frenzy of Castrato Raw (Fullback), the deconstructed dance-punk of Penetrator, the pseudo-tribal Animal Death Already Breathing the demonic dance Iron Feet the industrial repetition of Ultra Shade (Beat My Blood Dog Down) would have sounded revolutionary 45 years earlier, not in 2025. Songs like Tear Pusher (which lasts a whopping three minutes) and Sickle Walk have little more than the undeniably spectacular drumming clangor to justify their existence. Blackout The highly dynamic Blackout and the closer Changer are perhaps the places where the subhuman vocals, the lethal keyboards and the spasmodic drumming find the most unlikely balance.
The double-LP Lighthouse (Swill Radio, 1999) is a colossal mess of ideas, from the expressionist theater of I Am Lloyd Lyson and She's A Cracker to the parodistic harpsichord sonata I Am A Lighthouse and the grotesque ballet Egg Mombassa and the rusty carillon motif of Oyster Shell via the ear-splitting electronics of If It's A Boy and X-Ray My Mind. The last twenty minutes are particularly verbose and irrelevant. The project feels like a rock opera by the Residents but without the musical skills and with a less funny sense of humor.
>Hard Candy (2008), yet another terrible album, used an impressive cast of producers (Nate "Danja" Hills, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams) to craft predictable and trivial dance numbers such as Four Minutes. About to turn 50, Madonna is turning into one ugly dumb middle-age woman who is still desperate for sex, perhaps because her private life was such a failure.
