Madonna - Confessions On A Dancefloor (WEA)

Travel late on the Paris metro. Lay flat out in the sweatiest, glammest club you can find. Take a sharp blade and carve out the biggest chunk of the dancefloor you can and hold it to your ear. That’s the sound of the new Madonna album.

Mostly co-written with Les Rhythms Digitales’ Stuart Price, Madonna’s ninth album doesn’t deviate from the in-your-face experimentation of Music and American Life. But what is new is a return to the disco era, from the mirror ball front cover to the Abba sample that underpins debut single Hung Up. It’s the first track in a continuous mix: over an hour with no silence, no breaks and certainly no ballads.

Get Together is a standout for me. Throbbing, filtered disco, it’s Madonna doing the Ibiza beach party thing at long last. The sound of Chicane covering Burning Up. Sorry, on the other hand, is a low light - the first in a string of cod confessionals, lyrically trite memos to Guy Ritchie where the more real-life the lyrics get the more I cringe.

Madonna teams up again with Music collaborator Mirwais for Future Lovers, one of the most pulsating tracks on the whole album. They deliver something they must have dreamt of since the start. A whole track built on Giorgio Moroder’s bass sequence from Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. You’ll be pleased to know they’ve treated it kindly – adding nothing but a delicious ever-ascending vocal hook.

There’s just one thing missing from all of these pulse-driven tracks and that’s the killer chorus. Sure, there are plenty of pop references, more than any previous album in fact. Like running a “let it be” refrain into the return of Papa Don’t Preach’s string quartet for Let It Will Be. But you do get the killer chorus in track eight – Jump – which combines all of this album’s good points with a hook the strength of Deeper And Deeper.

Push - first track to run at a slower, lower BPM – is an interesting mix. More domestic boredom lyrically but saved by another killer chorus. How High is a missed opportunity though. A shame because for this one Madonna actually begins to deliver an actual confession on the dancefloor - “Should I carry on? Will it matter when I’m gone?” - and ponder something more deeper.

I Love New York is Ray Of Light revisited. Where William Orbit sci-fi’d up a country track for his urban soundtrack, Stuart Price uses sirens and FM radio power trance. And by this track you would have either binned this album (disappointed that Madonna hadn’t grown up into that guitar-strumming activist from American Life) or you wouldn’t have paused for breath for a solid chuck of 120BPM disco. Personally I think Madonna’s back there where Music album had her. But she’s dispensed with the fake bling and accepted the fact that disco in 2005 is about atmosphere more than attitude.


This review also published in: Record Collector