{"id":32377,"date":"2025-07-30T12:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T12:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/32377\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T12:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T12:05:08","slug":"madonna-veronica-electronica-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/32377\/","title":{"rendered":"Madonna: Veronica Electronica Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The night before Thanksgiving 1997, Madonna<\/a> was partying with drag queens, circus performers, and fire-eaters. It was the second anniversary celebration for Liquid, the ultra-glamorous Miami party spot co-owned by the singer\u2019s close friend and rumored lover, Ingrid Casares. In Madonna\u2019s book Sex, Casares is the one who straddled railings and demanded to be finger-fucked; at Liquid, she was the vibe curator-in-chief who conjured its atmosphere of haute-bohemian pansexual debauchery\u2014the kind Madonna had depicted in her \u201cDeeper and Deeper<\/a>\u201d video a few years before. Casares\u2019 club was a magnet for models, moguls, and pop stars<\/a>, who would shimmy to resident DJs like Junior Vasquez, Victor Calderone, and Danny Tenaglia on velvet banquettes, raise glasses to their beautiful lives, and enjoy the excellent local cocaine.<\/p>\n

Just after midnight on November 26, Madonna and her entourage arrived and slipped the DJ a CD-R containing remixes of unreleased tracks. Everyone lost it. \u201cAll of a sudden, you heard the very beginning of Ray of Light<\/a>,\u201d said Casares<\/a>, likely referring to William Orbit<\/a>\u2019s Liquid Mix<\/a> of the title track. \u201cOnce people realized that it was her, they went really crazy. Even the mayor of Miami started dancing. At six o\u2019clock in the morning, I was still pushing people out.\u201d Veronica Electronica had arrived.<\/p>\n

In multiple interviews promoting Ray of Light in early 1998, Madonna described Veronica Electronica as a club-music obsessed \u201calter ego<\/a>\u201d who represented the flipside to the Kabbalah-wise spiritualist of her seventh studio album. She planned to release a collection of remixes and outtakes under the name that fall that included the \u201ctotally out of control<\/a>\u201d 10-minute original version of \u201cRay of Light\u201d and unreleased \u201ctripped-out, ambient shit<\/a>\u201d she had worked on with Orbit, the co-producer of all but one of the album\u2019s songs. The idea of Veronica Electronica still feels like a thrilling prospect. Its parent album is near-mythic at this point for its, well, liquid fusion of Bristol dub, stormy breakbeat, metal riffs, and posh orchestration, and a reappraisal could have created a musical dialogue with Ray of Light\u2019s contemporary<\/a> acolytes<\/a>, pop singers who slip into moonbathing reveries at the rave.<\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t the version of Veronica Electronica we got 27 years later. Rather than excavating weird, uncommercial offcuts from the Ray of Light sessions, this is a slight release that collects seven remixes, most widely available, as well as one demo left off the 1998 album. There\u2019s precious little trace of Orbit, and judging by a pointed recent statement<\/a> calling it \u201ca knockoff,\u201d he wasn\u2019t involved. Instead, the album pristinely remasters the big-tent donks of mixes by the Liquid lot\u2014and some of them still hit. BT and Sasha\u2019s Bucklodge Ashram New Edit of \u201cDrowned World \/ Substitute for Love\u201d turns the existential original into a Euro banger, whipping its desolate bridge into a frenzy like fiendish jockeys forcing a thoroughbred faster, faster, before a pyrotechnic drop. New York DJ Victor Calderone\u2019s New Edit of \u201cSky Fits Heaven\u201d buffs its percussion and turbo-charges the zaps that halo Madonna\u2019s voice with a euphoric final chorus which, like the classic Above & Beyond Club Mix of \u201cWhat It Feels Like for a Girl,\u201d<\/a> makes you want to cry and scream and dance all at once.<\/p>\n