Like it or not...

Posted November 12th, 2005 by jhuny

Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor

"I don't like cities but I love New York, other cities make me feel like a dork."

After the first four tracks, leading with the first single Hung Up, the album starts of quite strongly. And then we get the pile of shit that is I Love New York. I don't care what she was intending to do with this track, the fact is is that it's embarrassingly awful. Witness the rhyming of mad with sad and glad. She obviously didn't record this one in New York because she really does sound like a dork. After that, the album just doesn't seem to recover, at times she sounds like we're listening to some mediocre poetry recital.

It's a bit of a shame, because I really like the first four tracks, especially Hung Up. It's got a great driving beat, the ABBA sample is fantastic, it's catchy, and when it all drops out in the middle and builds up again it absolutely soars. It may not be classic Madonna, we may not even be hearing any of these tracks five years time but they do get you dancing. Future Lovers is just as strong, taking it's cue from Donna Summer's I Feel Love (what tribute to dance music wouldn't touch on this?) even if you can't help but be reminded of Kylie's Light Years.

Second-half album tracks such as Forbidden Love and How High are almost as good and eff me I do like the "spirituality on the dance floor" moment that is Isaac. And on the last track Madonna does her best Goldfrapp impersonation in Like It Or Not but doesn't quite get there. Each of the tracks smoothly fade into each other, with traces of dance floor classics throughout, providing some kind of dance floor journey. It's all extremely well polished and produced but by about the middle of the album it all just seems to blur into one seamless homogenous beat with no obvious highlights. And nothing that Madonna sings sounds like it is actually important, gone are the days when she wanted every girl in the world to Express Themselves and find men that are worthy of their love. Gone are the days when we simply had to "let our bodies move to the music".

Maybe I just expect too much from Madonna. Maybe I should just take her advice, that this is who she is, like it or not. Then again, like ABBA and Donna Summer, Madonna is an important part of dance floor history but much of this album doesn't do that any justice.

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