Rejecting the pressure to produce brief, easily digestible albums, Madness A. embraces a generous, theatrical narrative arc paired with a background message about the beautiful chaos that surrounds us. The Camden Town troupe arrives with reasons pressed into a form that serves as a “perfect antidote” to despair, especially through a pandemic epoch that demanded attention rather than avoidance. Their theatre of the absurd wears cruel humour lightly, wrapped in care. The result is a songbook that blends pop with operetta and music hall, echoing the high-pride tradition of the Kinks while pushing its own dramatic boundaries.
Like the celebrated ‘The Freedom of Norton Folgate’ (2009), this album centers on a singular concept and marks the maturity of Madness after more than four decades since their breakthrough. Six of the original seven members lead with Suggs’s acidic yet melodic vocal confidence, while an additional six tracks arrive as narrative interludes voiced by an actor, creating a 56-minute journey across fourteen songs. From the outset, Suggs invites listeners to step into the most sardonic form of cabaret within Victorian theater confines, a hermetically sealed space with no obvious exit.
baby thieves
The collection points toward shifting landscapes, changing attitudes, and evolving perspectives, all converging on a single, unflinching view of the world through a sardonic lens. The noir tale of the ‘baby thief’ follows a perplexing figure, a symbolic thief of innocence, while the gallop of ‘C’est la vie’ carries an exculpatory fatalism set to a subtle ska rhythm: “I’m not doing this, That’s life / That’s the way things are.” In ‘Isolation and escape’ the anxiety around Covid-19 is invoked, and ‘Run for your life’ erupts with a warlike urgency that mirrors fears of a global crisis.
All of this is voiced with Suggs’s hallmark emotional relativity, where irony slips through even when the stagecraft leans into hyperrealism. ‘On My Street’ stands out as a playful pastiche of the classic ‘Our House,’ peppered with references to drug trafficking, streets cluttered with garbage bags, and scenes echoing the day of reckoning. The album showcases inventive, unorthodox arrangements and strong compositional instincts: the uptempo momentum of ‘Round We Go’ recalls earlier cuts like ‘Dr. Kipa’ and ‘Set Me Free (Let Me Be)’ while maintaining a tempered groove that propels the record forward.
Suggs remains tuned to the era without clinging to nostalgia. He conveys both naive charm and genuine engagement with the human stories at hand. Madness delivers a bold, high-spirited work that refuses pretension, turning worldly troubles into spectacle and ultimately framing a plea for mercy for the fate of humanity. [Critical perspective: Madness album review, 2024].