If you’ve encountered any commercials in the past couple years, you’ve likely heard “Electric Love,” off of Garrett Borns’ synthy 2015 album Dopamine. Even if you haven’t, you could probably guess it came from an ad for something or other. Such is the nature of the beast: acts that combine synth-pop and rock and a not-overly-generous spritz of funk, straining to be liked by as many people as possible, commissioned and talked about in terms of utility: “could slot in a playlist or festival lineup alongside MGMT and Currents-era Tame Impala.”
Blue Madonna, BØRNS’ follow-up to Dopamine, differs from its predecessor mostly by having a less atrocious cover. Where Dopamine boasted big-name producers like Jeff Bhasker and Emile Haynie, Blue Madonna only brings back one, Tommy English (Ladyhawke, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness). But the expensive sheen with which he coats most of the tracks here makes these songs more or less indistinguishable. Mirroring the turn toward gloom in pop on and just outside the charts, Borns said earlier this year the album came out of a “melancholy feeling of departure,” but while there certainly are breakup songs, they’re nothing that’d harsh a festival crowd too much. And like all of Borns’ work, Blue Madonna’s main value over replacement synth-pop is his falsetto, capable of reaching a glam-rock frenzy but constrained in songs that never quite allow him to go there.
Another difference: a guest artist, Lana Del Rey, with whom Borns shares a couple ideas about aesthetics and the moody side of L.A. Unfortunately, while Lana’s been surprisingly lively on other guest spots, Borns got her at her most soporific, and the two are rather bloodless for a track called “God Save Our Young Blood.” At almost four minutes, it’s no longer than anything else on the album, but it feels endless. Similarly languid is “Second Night of Summer,” basically a classed-up Maroon 5 song. They even crash and skid at the exact same part of the chorus: Levine with “motherfucker,” Borns with a “throwing me that shade like I’m not cool enough.” (Mourn, once again, the loss of Shade Court.)
Better are the likes of the synth buzz of “Faded Heart,” however canned, or the rock riffs of “We Don’t Care,” though they’ve gone through so much processing they’re practically taxidermied, or the surprisingly decent groove of “Iceberg,” although once it gets going it abruptly stops. And for a genre that’s by definition safe, Blue Madonna does have one pleasant surprise: “Supernatural” features a theremin interlude by self-taught virtuoso Armen Ra. “I feel like he crash-landed into the album from his star,” Borns said earlier this month. “I had to summon him from the cosmos.” He’s not wrong; the bridge is sumptuous, given all the room it needs, and made of totally different stuff than the rest of the album. It’s a glimpse, however fleeting, of the album that might result if BØRNS spent as much time teasing out the weirdness in his ideas as smoothing out the wrinkles in his luxe suit.
