Tuesday, November 15, 2005
How Grandma didn't get her groove back
If American Life was for the head, Confessions On A Dance Floor is strictly meant for the feet. However, while music critics by and large have given an overall enthusiastic thumbs up (Entertainment Weekly's Michael Slezak may quite possibly kickstart the first male menstrual cycle with his finger snapped salute to COADF on PopWatch) to Confessions, I wasn't quite ready to take my vintage pair of Sergio Valentes out of storage to party like it was 1985 all over again. I suppose this is the part where I should renounce my platinum fag hag membership because I dared to back away from the altar of Our Lady of Ciccone, but for an album designed to coax the party-girl-gone-astray out of me, I felt like a wallflower for longer than expected while tuned in.
Moving away from the aristocratic English pretension of her current Lady Madonna incarnation and back into the darkened jungle where she's always been most at home, the first three tracks come at you with the fury of a disco inferno and are worthy of instant repeat value. The first single, "Hung Up" is a delectable slice of heaven which owes much of the frenetic BPM's to ABBA's 1979 campy chestnut "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)." The constant clock ticking which seems to be a concurrent theme throughout blends into the blurry soundscape of the Stardust-inspired "Get Together." Rounding out the amplified trifecta is an litany of multilingual apologies which picks up the pace yet again as "Sorry" pounds with a driving bassline courtesy of the Jackson's "Can You Feel It."
The problems begin when she starts to drift from the guilty pleasures of merely shaking your ass down to the ground to the overwhelming need to spout off more empty truisms with a "deeper meaning." On the dubiously titled "Let It Will Be," Madge gets all E! True Hollywood Story on us with a spiffy opener: "Now I can tell you about success, about fame/About the rise and the fall of all the stars in the sky..." Sound familiar? It should, the rehash was detailed ad nauseum on "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" 7 years ago. Haven't we had all the inner peace/ethereal reference bases covered since she spit out her litter of rugrats and allegedly gained a conscience? If I hear one more allusion to light, I may just need to indulge in a bit of erotic asphyxiation with a red string bracelet. And in her tongue-in-cheek ode to the city that never sleeps has even more embarrassing dialogue than her last children's book: "I don't like cities, but I like New York/Other places make me feel like a dork."
British DJ/remixer Stuart Price a.k.a. Jacques Du Cont (of Les Rhythmes Digitales) was brought in this time around as the main collaborator and his productions swathes each cut with dizzying pace and dense production. The LP was mixed as a throwback to older disco EP's which flowed seamlessly from one song to another irregardless to track numbers. However, the digital bells and whistles could've benefited from less trendy techno posturing and simply more percussion of the traditional house variety. This merely seems like window dressing as opposed to some of her latter-day gems which winked and nodded to the joys of rediscovering the groove on Impressive Instant, Nothing Really Matters and Thief Of Hearts with ease.
In her attempt to prove that she can still hang out with the raver kids past a yoga mama's scheduled curfew, it only makes me long for the sugar rush of her early classics all the more. A time when she believed in power of the beat and remaining under the DJ's spell would save the world. And when she used to dance... for inspiration.
Rating:
Download this: Hung Up, Get Together, Sorry, Forbidden Love, Push, Jump
Labels: album review, Madonna, music, new CD
5 Comments:
- Fresh commented at 11/16/2005 07:36:00 PM~
Dang girl, your reviews are off the chain.... :-)
- commented at 11/16/2005 08:33:00 PM~
I love the new Madonna song...
Just in case you want to hear the original, drop by the AbbA party in NYC this Friday, it's not too far from the IRT (see http://www.abbaparty.com/2005/ for details)- Butta commented at 11/18/2005 04:46:00 PM~
CTHU @ the title of this post!
- TriniPrincess commented at 11/18/2005 06:04:00 PM~
@ Berry
*curtsy* Oh you flatterer, you... ;o)
@ Anon
I haven't been @ Mars 2112 in a minute...it's colder than a witch's tit out tonight, but that looks like fun.
@ Butta
LOL...I got threatened by a disciple of the Material Girl for pointing out the Botoxed obvious. Ah well. *cheese*- Michael commented at 11/18/2005 06:31:00 PM~
Madonna has become such a boring old lady. As always, fantastic entry, Trini.
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