★★★★☆
When Christine and the Queens was undertaking an intense personal journey, delving deep into the self, sex and sexuality, and arriving at the masculine figure he’s since named Redcar, he would frequently notice the archangel Michael around him – and would pray to him. Consequently, a towering red resin statue of the saintly figure would loom over Chris at his shows, in support of last year’s predominantly French-sung Redcar Les Adorables Étoiles album.
Whilst this statued Michael was a potent symbolic part of the Frenchman’s theatrics, there was also a very real-world Michael – specifically, a Mike – who Chris met in early 2021, and who would sharpen and elucidate some of the finer aspects of Chris’ music. This Mike in question is, of course, Mike Dean.
Whilst a producer can all-too-easily assume the nebulous role as the brains behind the beauty, with an interminable degree of credit, Christine and the Queens’ latest album, PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE, truly does hold the unmistakable bass power of a classic Mike Dean project; one which, as Chris has quite rightly described, “often makes you feel like you’re in a spaceship about to take off when he turns on the subs and plays his keyboards and guitars.”
Where Rick Rubin recently trimmed-down Kesha’s expression to its bare essentials on the pop star’s album Gag Order, here the producer dials-up the intensity to full blast.
None of this should take the shine off Chris. PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE is the work of a true artist, a sculptor, whose work has been hammered into shape, one huge, synth-led crescendo at a time. Like entering a dark tunnel, underground cave, or indeed a spaceship, there’s a simultaneous sense of room even as you turn in on yourself.
This is an album that reminds you there are no more expansive territories than the inner self – a voyage of introversion Chris has ventured more than most.
Delivered in a classic three-act structure – setup, confrontation, resolution – PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE begins with sci-fi sounding ‘Overture’, which as its name implies, isn’t so much a memorable tune as a setup for the profundity that follows.
Photo: Jasa Muller
Chris’ final few words on this opener might be “from where I stand, everything is glorious”, but this is something of a brave face for the bouts of anguish that follow, of which subsequent tune ‘Tears so soft provides’ provides.
This previously released track is the best on the album. Sampling the whiny orchestral work of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Feel All My Love Inside’, its message of facing-up to suffering is delivered in a sound that preserves just enough melody beneath its hefty synths, reminiscent of Massive Attack’s Protection. Chris’ repetitive opening refrain, “I miss my mama, miss my mother Miss my mama at night” bears yet more weight given the singer’s mother, Martine Letissier, died suddenly in 2019.
The concluding stringwork that scuttles towards the song’s end echoes the sense of hope pronounced earlier by the singer, “let me pray for my salvation, baby”, with the vocals as haunting as another Bristol outfit in Portishead’s Beth Gibbons.
‘Marvin descending’ epitomises some of the more serene moments on the album as a whole – at least until its spiraling guitars give some degree of kick midway through. Twirling, piano-led ‘Flowery days’ – pitched at the point where Chris begins to see TRUE LOVE as the only means towards salvation (“And I wish you could love into the flowery days”) – provides another.
‘Aimer, puis vivre’, with its fast-paced hi-hat keeping time with the French lyrical pitter-patter, will later beautifully lay down the push-and-pull that TRUE LOVE tests, “Love, love with, love without love… “Et pourtant je suis seul, et je me ressens seul” (“And yet I’m alone, and I feel alone”).
The clever repurposing of ‘Pachelbel’s Canon’, meanwhile, from the 17th-century German composer (no copyright infringement case likely here), for the track ‘Full of life’ gives yet another obvious moment of bliss – the original typically being used to soothe nerves at weddings.
And then, of course, there’s Madonna. Reference of her involvement so low isn’t owing to quality, but the fact she isn’t so much a guest vocalist as a cameo performer amid this 90-plus minute showdown, playing the role of the ‘One Big Eye’ who reemerges in each of the album’s three discs.
A true performer with roots in the theatre, Chris saw Madonna as the ideal voice of authority with a similar inkling for melodrama, “sending her lines to read instead of choruses to sing, appealing to the actress in her,” he’s explained. Only the crashing ‘Lick the light out’ offers much more than a Madonna line-reading.
Photo: Jasa Muller
New Jersey rapper 070 Shake provides the album’s other notable feature. As on the pair’s previous collaboration ‘Body’ (from 070 Shake’s You Can’t Kill Me), there are themes of lust and carnal desire, with the steamy ‘Let me touch you once’ as breathy as it is howling.
As with any record that significantly spills over the hour mark, PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE leaves itself open to fault (even if Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You demonstrated last year this can be achieved with as close to perfection as you’re likely to hear).
The chief gripe on this record is that at times the crashing intensity of Dean’s subs become too repetitive. ‘He’s been shining for ever, your son’ is almost an unnecessary add-on; and whilst the tenth track (simply named ‘Track 10’) has some genuinely thrilling moments, including its breakbeat interpolation and Chris’ Franglais chatter and sinister laughing, at 11 minutes long it borders the self-indulgent.
Likewise, there’s much to admire about plodding album closer ‘Big eye’, but its grandeur is almost too overbearing – something that’s more befitting of a one-off musical opera than an album to return to again and again.
Yet in many ways, that’s precisely how you should listen to this record. It’s a genuine work of art, an expression of personal excavation with the purest form of storytelling: beginning, middle and end; PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE.
You wonder what archangel Michael, watching down, would make of it, answering the prayers of Christine and the Queens.
