Confessions on a Dance Floor
Yes, you heard right – Madonna just said that she feels like a dork outside New York City. If anything, “I Love New York” and the rest of *Confessions on a Dance Floor* prove that you can put the grown-up club kid on an English country estate, but it might take surgical intervention to take the club kid out. Co-produced by Madonna and Stuart Price, *Confessions* is the sound of a woman who’s still in touch with the bratty brashness of early gems like “Lucky Star” and “Dress You Up” – just listen to the crazy-for-you mooning of its first single, “Hung Up.” The album’s return to pulsing floor grooves displays a Madonna who’s able to have it both ways: “Sorry” demonstrates how little difference there can be between teen and adult romantic drama, while much of the album is a pop-happy celebration of love as its own form of spiritual awakening.
On her 14th album, the pop star teams with Stuart Price and rolls back the clock; her latest iteration is a pre-Madonna disco vixen, basking in a '70s musical style that she herself, among others, helped to morph and displace.
Check out our album review of Madonna's 'Confessions on a Dance Floor' on Rolling Stone.com.
Given the cold shoulder Madonna's 2003 album American Life received by critics and audiences alike -- it may have gone platinum, but apart from the Bond theme “Die Another Day,” released in advance of the album, it generated no new Top Ten singles (in fact, its title track barely cracked the Top 40) -- it's hard not to read its 2005 follow-up, Confessions on a Dance Floor, as a back-to-basics move of sorts: after a stumble, she's returning to her roots, namely the discos and clubs where she launched her career in the early '80s.
After man dies...You’d think that after the likes of ‘Swept Away’ and her last album, the bland ‘American Life’, people would have actually got tired of writing off Madonna, and instead decided to expend some rare positive energy in the direction of her heirs apparent, the likes of Gwen Stefani and, er…well, the point is that in today’s cluttered synthetic pop landscape there’s still no-one quite like Madonna, where every new album is an experiment, a branching into new audio and visual territories.
Aside from “Hung Up” and “Sorry,” the insanely catchy second single, this isn’t the mindlessly fun dance album we were promised.