Christine and the Queens - PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE

On ‘PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ - the second, third and fourth parts to 2022’s ‘Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)’ - Chris reembodies his concept character, Redcar. Following his mother’s death in 2019, Chris’s fourth full-length devours omnipresent grief, squelching its teeth into and reemerging from it like a worm into an apple, colliding with undiscovered seeds of pain to craft a musical bildungsroman of loss, divinity and rediscovery. Across 20 pop operatic tracks, Redcar undergoes euphoric devastation and metaphorical death, entering the brightest light with all the profound ecstasy of Prior’s visions in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the play from which the album takes inspiration. This approach positions reality as narrative arc, wherein the performance of succumbing to pain is to find peace and rediscover joy. Take ‘Tears can be so soft’, a Marvin-Gaye-infused musing on the cathartic power of sobbing: “Tears can be so good for those who dive in them […] Let them roll on your face, girl,” he sings. Concurrent with the dramaturgy, Chris sets the bar high: the record’s brilliance lies in an innovative ocean of modern opera, blending elements of soul, pop, trap, R&B, drum ‘n’ bass and musical theatre. The presence of hip hop producer Mike Dean on the album lends a post-pop sound. On ‘PARANOÏA…’, modernity is conjoined to high art, an affinity for which reaches caricaturist highs on the transformational, visionary ‘Full of life’, which samples German composer Pachelbel. Meanwhile, the disembodied voice of Madonna across three experimental tracks paints a lucid picture of the artist as an embodiment of consciousness, motherhood and God (see triumphant standout ‘Lick the light out’). Pop music, then, becomes religious, while the meshing of anachronistic art, music and pop culture deities crafts beauty from the seemingly disconnected: transcendental poetic art pop sculpted - chiselled, in fact - from rapturous spirituality. A far way away from debut ‘Chaleur humaine’, yet just as unafraid, ’PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ is like no other exploration of grief - a new magnum opus.