The Boston Globe du lieu suivant : Boston, Massachusetts • 243

THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE MARCH 1, 1998 Madonna captures the moment and sees the spiritual light By Joan Anderman GLOBE CORRESPONDENT 1 a 7 '0 v4t V' (Pi i i jf-, in Her latest incarnation is Mystical Madonna, with wavy tresses and a dewy new look but 'Ray of Light' is a sumptuous, serious cycle of songs. The release of a Madonna album her new one, "Ray of Light," is due Tuesday amounts to so much more than a handful of new songs. To be sure, she no longer fH Rov'oui saddles the musicfashionculture UU KeVieW as she did in the mjd-'SOs, when armed with not more than an ear for a dance track, a writhing midsection, and fierce belief in the power of her own personality she transposed the New York club-music underground into the bouncy beat of pop superstardom. But even a string of forgettable films Surprise," "Who's That wildly inconsistent musical product (1989's exhilarating "Like a Prayer," for example, was followed by 1990's abysmal "I'm and her drastically miscalculated publishing campaign to conquer America's final frontier with 1992's show-all book "Sex" and its aural aid, "Erotica," haven't quieted the public's appetite for Madonna. She remains, after all, the mainstream's most powerful magnet for camera-ready controversy.

(Courtney Love is giving her a good run for her money, but Love's indie-girl acridness hasn't been entirely obliterated by the layers of stylists' perfumed paints, and that rock band of hers will never play in Peoria.) Madonna is the perfect modern pinup girl. She sells self-expression off the rack, blasphemy you can dance to, for your coffee table, and most recently in case anyone forgot along the way that she's got a heart romance, in the form of 1994's tepid, soft-soul "Bedtime Stories." Trouble is, Madonna's undulating persona, fueled in equal parts by savvy opportunism and true-blue creative juice, has almost entirely obscured her pop music voice. Carrying "Evita" lent her some of the queensex machine credibility she so desperately craves, but I'd rather listen to the trashiest Madonna cut than suffer through a blockbuster refrain from Andrew Lloyd Webber's odes to the lowest common denominator. She's kept her audience, yes, but lost her way in the bargain. A remarkable album Welcome back, girlfriend.

"Ray of Light" (Maverick-Warner Bros.) is a remarkable album. It comes as no surprise that the record is awash in electronica; Madonna's great gift is to spot the cult trend of the moment, employ that sound's master craftsmen (in this case, the brilliant producer William Orbit), and overlay her own dance-pop sensibilities. What's extraordinary is how thoroughly Madonna has immersed herself in unfamiliar, and commercially unproven, musical territory. "Ray of Light" is no ambient-Lite project, no collection of Top 40 hits slapped with an occasional electronic flourish to prove its hipster quotient. It's a deeply spiritual dance record, ecstatically textured, a sumptuous, serious cycle of songs that goes a long way toward liberating Madonna from a career built on scavenged images and cultivated identities.

That said, one could argue that "Ray of Light" merely signals the arrival of her latest incarnation Mystical Madonna, let's say, complete with long, wavy tresses and a dewy new look which amounts to one more beautifully realized co-option carried out by a market-driven celebrity with limited potential for her own innovation. The difference is that Madonna's current musical journey is buoyed by an unprecedented interior odyssey. Motherhood has been known to soften the hardest hearts; in Madonna's case it seems to have torn open a window-size hole. And that view of the artist, revealed in the first unforced, captivating singing I've heard from her, and words that aspire to something deeper and more personal than textbook emotions and dance-floor incantations, reverberates through "Ray of Light" as surely as her collaborators' finely honed musicianship. "I traded fame for love Without a second thought It all became a silly game Some things cannot be bought Got exactly what I asked for Wanted it so badly Running, rushing back for more I suffered fools So gladly And now I find I've changed my mind" is the confessional (from "Drowned World Substitute for that opens the album.

Sophisticated wordplay it's not. But it does sound like the truth, and that's a revelation for an artist notorious for being every sort of creature but herself. Here, as on the 12 following tracks, Madonna sings over shifting layers of sound that sift one into the next, emphasizing mood over structure. Airy, whirring tones and muted bells thicken into a melancholy, undertow, gathering sprays of feedback and machine-gun drum fills as it swells to an industrial clatter, then drops off its own edge into a swirl of throbbing, buzzing points of sound. Orbit, the album's co-producer and co-writer (along with longtime collaborator Patrick Leonard, plus Rick Nowels and Susannah Mel-voin), has made some of the most evocative trip-trance music on record with, among others, Massive Attack and his own Strange Cargo album series.

On "Ray of Light," he coaxes dazzling color and voluptuous contours from his knobs and buttons, which move in startling synchro-nicity with Madonna's newly colored, contoured voice. Orbit deserves credit for the sheer artistry of sound on this album. But there's an art to Madonna's vision as well. She's an inspired navigator and cuts a tantalizing path through her newfound spiritualism, dance-club roots, and electronic soundscape. In "Shanti Ashtangi," Madonna sings the praises of "the gurus' lotus feet" in an ancient Sanskrit text set to a dense mass of sampled sounds from India and Morocco, a rattling drum-and-bass groove, and gauzy blasts of electric guitar.

Her ambition, clearly, hasn't been sacrificed to the inner journey. She set out to harness heaven and earth, and makes a valiant play of it. Back to the '60s My guess is that Madonna's dabblings in Eastern thought and music led her through the back door to this album's most exotic reference: the '60s. For such a post-everything girl, the heavy, psychedelic languor of "Candy Perfume Girl" with its whimsical, Sgt. Pepper's pipe organ break, stream-of-conseiousness lyrics, and blaze of acid rock guitars (amid the heavy beats and futuristic noodlings) is an arresting stretch.

But from there it's a short passage to a dreamy trilogy "The Power of Goodbye," and "To Have and Not to during which Madonna carries on a dialogue with herself about the path to divine openness. Here her philosophical reach begins to exceed her songwriting grasp. Only "Frozen" (the album's first single) achieves a state of divine balladry, recalling the emotional pitch and simmering beauty of 1986's "Live to Tell" with a dark, lush string section, the smash and patter of a lone dram, and an ominous, pulsing buzz. Mystical Madonna would surely appreciate the cosmic symmetry in the notion that her most adventurous outing yet doubles as I homecoming. The album's title cut is one of several disco-trance tracks (including "Skin" and "Nothing Really? that are on a crash course with every late-night rave on the planet.

For all its ambient glory, "Ray of Light" reminds us that the dance floor is her turf, and swaggering hooks her currency. That's not to suggest that a familiar fit invariably translates into a good song. With its slow, maudlin changes and copius cliches, "Skin" sounds uncannily like an Andrew Lloyd Webber number, heavy on the Orbit remix. It's simply a relief to find her after so many years spent dodging the fallout of her own misguided expectations doing what comes naturally. "Jweetgr I SPECIAL CENTENNIAL EVENT Andre Rieu and the jfa I It 1 1 1 a iLi US iWVi I'J- 7 ill jii.riiiin,vii--u-iti'iii--i-nir,T a JJ 1 1 Strauss Orchestra Aw.

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