Madonna Confessions On A Dance Floor CD

On Confessions On A Dance Floor, Madonna, the most popular and significant female artist in pop music, returns unapologetically to her roots. A stunning blend of musical styles with one foot in early disco (` la Giorgio Moroder) and the other pointed toward the future, Confessions On A Dance Floor is all about having a good time straight through and non-stop, says the Material Mom, who co-wrote and co-produced every track. For Madonna and music fans everywhere, the all-dance, noballad Confessions On A Dance Floor is a welcome guilty pleasure. This limited edition comes in packaged in special packaging and includes the bonus track 'Fighting Spirit'. Warner. 2005.

1998's RAY OF LIGHT marked Madonna's move toward electronica, and a larger journey back to her dance-club roots. That journey was completed with 2005's CONFESSIONS ON A DANCEFLOOR. A collection of hardcore club tracks with few mainstream pop concessions, CONFESSIONS is packed wall-to-wall with driving, electronica-driven grooves.
Madonna has always been one of the reigning queens of postmodern alchemy, and this record is a perfect example of her magic. A primary layer of sleek, old-school disco is combined with pile-driving house and techno, not to mention more than a few contemporary production flourishes. Either directly or indirectly, CONFESSIONS references '70s and early-'80s dance music, including Madonna's own, but while the album seems retro in several areas, it also has a distinct futuristic sheen. Nothing here has the hook-heavy single status of "Material Girl" or "Like A Prayer," but the pulsing intensity of the tracks is sheer sonic pleasure, making Madonna's return to straight-up dance music a welcome homecoming.
Given the cold shoulder Madonna's 2003 album American Life received by critics and audiences alike -- it may have gone platinum, but it was her first album ever not to have a single enter the Billboard pop Top Ten (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. It's not just that she's returning to dance music -- in a way, she's been making hardcore dance albums ever since 1998's Ray of Light, her first full-on flirtation with electronica -- but that she's revamping and updating disco on Confessions instead of pursuing a bolder direction. While it's true to a certain extent that contemporary dance music is still recycling and reinventing these songs -- besides, anything '80s is in vogue in 2005 -- coming from Madonna, it sounds like a retreat, an inadvertent apology that she's no longer on the cutting edge, or at least an admission that she's inching ever closer to 50. And no matter how she may disguise it beneath glistening layers of synths, or by sequencing the album as a non-stop party, Confessions on a Dance Floor is the first album where Madonna seems like a veteran musician. Not only is there a sense of conscious craft to the album, in how the sounds and the songs segue together, but in how it explicitly references the past -- both her own and club music in the larger sense -- the music seems disassociated from the present; Madonna is reworking familiar territory, not pushing forward, in a manner not dissimilar to how her former opening act the Beastie Boys returned to old-school rap on their defiantly old-fashioned 2004 album To the 5 Boroughs. But where the Beasties are buoyed by their camaraderie, Madonna has always been a stubborn individual, working well with collaborators but always, without question, existing on her own terms, and this obstinate nature is calcifying slightly into isolation on Confessions. There's no emotional hook in the music, either in its icy surface or in the lyrics, and the hard-headed intention to deliver a hardcore dance album means that this feels cold and calculated, nRolling Stone (No. 987, p.129) - 3.5 out of 5 stars - "...CONFESSIONS comes on like an all-out disco inferno..."
Spin (pp.106-107) - "The killer single 'Hung Up' spins a trilly Abba keyboard sample into a four-on-the-floor disco reverie."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.99) - 4 stars out of 5 - "[T]he tunes are swoonable....A brilliant disco record from a woman unafraid to look in the mirror, even at this stage of her game, and talk dirty..."