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It’s hard to overstate the impact of Ray of Light, Madonna’s seventh album. Released in 1998, it totally reshaped Madonna’s career, embracing trip-hop, electronica and Britpop and essentially proving to an unfriendly public that she was one of pop’s great auteurs. It spawned one of her biggest singles – the haunting power ballad Frozen – and its title track is still a staple of radio and DJ playlists. In the past few years, many of contemporary and underground pop’s most significant names – including Caroline Polachek, Addison Rae, a.s.o., Shygirl and FKA twigs – have referenced Ray of Light, whether directly or indirectly. It’s a fool’s errand to try to make a case for the best or most significant Madonna album – she has at least five strong contenders – but if there’s a consensus pick, it’s Ray of Light.
Which is why the announcement of Veronica Electronica, a full-length Ray of Light remix album, was met with such hysteria from fans earlier this year. Madonna has spoken at length over the years about both Veronica the character – in true Madonna fashion, Veronica stems from a vaguely contradictory concept in which she is both a girl dancing at a club and, somehow, “medieval” – and the album, which she intended to release after Ray of Light but ended up shelving. For diehards, the promised record is something of a holy grail – never mind that this long-awaited release only contains two truly new songs, one of which, an old demo titled Gone Gone Gone, has been floating around on the internet for years.
Even so, it’s hard to deny the simple pleasures that can be derived from hearing some all-time great Madonna remixes cut down to radio length and sequenced like the original Ray of Light. Drowned World/Substitute for Love sounds great taken out of its original glacial trip-hop context and turned into a DayGlo acid rager by BT and Sasha; the emotional ambiguities of the original song are replaced with warm positivity, and you can easily imagine the song soundtracking the final minutes of a raging house party as the sun begins to rise. Other tracks, such as Peter and Victor’s remix of Skin – the other new song here – take an opposite tack; they heighten Skin’s innate moodiness with a steely, exploratory techno beat punctuated by big, sharp breaks, turning the original track into something tweaky and unsettled.
As is often the case with remix records, there are moments on Veronica Electronica that feel perfunctory – namely, the Club 69 remix of Nothing Really Matters. Perhaps any remix of the original song will always be held to a higher standard, given its status as one of the only out-and-out club tracks on Ray of Light, but unlike many of the remixes on the album, it feels as if there’s no relationship between the source material and the rework here, aside from Madonna’s vocal, which is looped to the point of irritation. It’s frustrating when people claim to “hate remixes”, as if you can put a blanket statement on an entire artform, but this kind of remix may make you sympathise with the sentiment.
Fabien’s Good God mix of The Power of Good-Bye, on the other hand, represents all the potential of a curio project like this: a bizarrely minimal drum’n’bass rework of one of Madonna’s best ballads, it finds enormous power in the conflict between Fabien’s increasingly frenetic drums and Madonna’s serene, sorrowful vocal. It’s a surprisingly appropriate lead-in to Gone Gone Gone, a song so brilliantly weird that you really can understand why it was left off the original album. It is, essentially, a wistful breakup ballad set to a squelchy electro beat – a surreal tonal clash that hardly gels with Ray of Light’s placid waters, but which gives a surprising amount of insight into Madonna’s creative state at the time: here is one of the biggest stars in the world, in her creative prime, throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks. For that peek behind the curtain alone, Veronica Electronica is worth the price of admission.
