Elton John - Madman Across The Water

Dear Froxx - ZZ Top opened the door.

There are two Elton Johns: the annoying, sappy, popster that appeared sometime around 1975 and seems to have gotten worse as the years rolled by, and the Elton John that preceeded him with expansive and intricate pop songs filled with lush arrangements and superb musicianship. That early guy created two great albums that occupied a lot of my very early youth. This is one of them.

Pretentious, occasionally overblown, filled with Bernie Taupin annoyances (but come on, how can you resist, "He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas morn, when the New York Times said God is dead."), it is still sonically stunning and so much better than both its contextual brethren, and most radio fare laid out for us today. Madman, along with Tumbleweed Connection, stand as a fortress against all the other crap that he dropped on us later. His multitude of musical sins can be forgiven just because he gave us this.

amg:

Trading the cinematic aspirations of Tumbleweed Connection for a tentative stab at prog rock, Elton John and Bernie Taupin delivered another excellent collection of songs with Madman Across the Water. Like its two predecessors, Madman Across the Water is driven by the sweeping string arrangements of Paul Buckmaster, who gives the songs here a richly dark and haunting edge. And these are songs that benefit from grandiose treatments. With most songs clocking in around five minutes, the record feels like a major work, and in many ways it is. While it's not as adventurous as Tumbleweed Connection, the overall quality of the record is very high, particularly on character sketches "Levon" and "Razor Face," as well as the melodramatic "Tiny Dancer" and the paranoid title track. Madman Across the Water begins to fall apart toward the end, but the record remains an ambitious and rewarding work, and John never attained its darkly introspective atmosphere again.


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