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Celeb News: 'MDNA' reviews
Member Since: 11/8/2011
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Quote:
On Madonna’s best albums — “Like a Virgin".
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Member Since: 10/8/2009
Posts: 4,844
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Consequence of Sound
http://consequenceofsound.net/2012/0...-madonna-mdna/
2 out of 5 stars
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There’s something depressing about Madonna’s latest video for “Girl Gone Wild”. For one, it’s the exact same concept as “Vogue”, which is now 22 years old, and for some reason Americans consider it provocative. How is that even possible? Not only did she perform at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show (a night which charted the highest ratings in American television history), but in the age of Jersey Shore, 1000 Ways to Die, 16 and Pregnant, Toddlers & Tiaras, and TMZ, the Queen of Pop – ahem, the same royalty who’s even published children’s books – is hardly “too raunchy.” Let’s not even get started on the half a billion videos processed through YouTube on a daily basis.
Perhaps that explains why Madge feels the need to hammer in the idea that she’s still a bad girl. What most might consider established truths in the Madonna mythos has become renewable information on her 12th studio album, MDNA. ”Girls they just wanna have some fun,” she sings, echoing Cyndi Lauper on “Girl Gone Wild”, later stating that her “inhibition’s gone away.” Sound familiar? It’s a retread of almost everything she’s said before in the past 30 years, and though ultimately catchy, it lacks any subtlety or nuance to make you feel this is doing anything but reaching.
This sort of plasticity continues throughout the album. The pandering shock ‘n’ pizazz of “Gang Bang” melds dubstep with a femme fatale spoken-word vignette that might have others rethinking their slams against Lana Del Rey. “If you’re gonna act like a bitch, then you’re gonna die like a bitch,” Madonna exclaims over digitized warbles and, ugh, race car samples. The whole thing might have worked if the dubstep didn’t feel so catered and she actually added more theatrics. On “Superstar”, she works with a rhyme scheme that’s beyond infantile and lyrics seemingly stripped from a fifth grader’s notebook at the history fair (e.g. “You’re Abe Lincoln because you fight for what’s right”). Later on, the phony sentiments reach a startling peak on “I’m a Sinner”, a track so obvious that it’s baffling her producers didn’t stop her at first glance of the song’s title. Whereas she used to craft dizzying spectacles that were both insightful and emotional, she lays it all out here, bolds the key terms, and highlights the fluff.
What’s puzzling is that producer William Orbit lent a hand on these particular tracks. Having previously worked with Madonna, most notably on 1998′s dynamite Ray of Light, the man’s familiar with her strengths and weaknesses, and on MDNA, he proves it. While the aforementioned three of his six tracks suffer remarkably, the other half consists of the album’s most solid inclusions. ”Love Spent” segues banjo-plucking with 8-bit instrumentation that catapults an emotional confession revolving around a romance fractured by fortune. It’s a fitting anthem for Madonna and one that seamlessly blends into the sparkling decadence of “Masterpiece”. Lifted off the soundtrack of her recent directorial effort, W.E., the track swings back to her early ’90s days (think 1995′s Something to Remember). The last of the three is closing track “Falling Free”, an indelibly poignant track that adds flesh to a fairly robotic album. Coming off a divorce to Guy Ritchie, it’s these three tracks – especially the closer – that truly feel as if she’s speaking candidly.
It’s only then that she hits the heart. Now, this was a feat she exercised with ease once before, but something she’s struggled with over the past decade. On MDNA, she almost skips the cardiac attention completely, and it’s likely because she masks herself with so much clutter. She forces herself into these aural experiments, as if she feels compelled to stay relevant by dabbling with present-day talent and genres. Why else would she throw in haphazard appearances by M.I.A. or Nicki Minaj on her boisterous first single “Give Me All Your Luvin’”? Or attempt to rap on a messy track like the Martin Solveig-produced “I Don’t Give A”? These follies only discount her credibility, opening her up to discourse on whether she still claims the throne. To counter, her genre husband Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, once put these moves to action back in the late ’80s and especially in the early ’90s by marrying his style to new jack swing, Eddie Van Halen, Slash, and even Michael Jordan (well, on video at least), but he never took backseat. The collaborations always felt whole, fresh, and necessary. By comparison here, Madonna’s work alongside the Benassi Bros. on the electrified “I’m Addicted” is the only unique match up that storms out unscathed.
It’s not hard to figure out why Madonna’s kept such strong focus on her collaborators. Since she’s hit the scene, she’s dealt with a string of admirers, detractors, and imitators. In today’s era of pop, she’s surrounded by a rogue’s gallery of juggernauts, who are all admittedly doing far more with their sound than she is. That’s okay, though, because that was always bound to happen. Rather than try to top them, however, she should put her energy into her strengths instead of parading around marquee names and treading through genres that, most of the time, she’s late to reach. (Having said that, her delicious tinkering with disco on 2005′s Confessions on the Dance Floor remains an absolute joy.) Maybe it’s just the nepotism that explains this way of thinking. After all, she does have the aggressive Nicki Minaj growling, “There’s only one queen, and that’s Madonna, bitch.” Regardless of the endorsement, it might behoove her to start thinking of her successor.
Then again, Elizabeth I never named hers, either.
Essential Tracks: “Falling Free”, “I’m Addicted”, “Masterpiece”, and “Love Spent”
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Member Since: 6/17/2011
Posts: 1,986
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Speaking from a HUGE Madonna fan, I'm disappointed. It felt like she was trying to recreate the magic that happened with COADF, and it didn't work so well. Waaay better than Hard Candy tho, I'd rank MDNA somewhere in the middle compared to her other albums.
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Member Since: 10/8/2009
Posts: 4,844
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Quote:
Originally posted by Br0ckk
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Don't come for Over & Over and Shoo-Bee-Do.
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Member Since: 3/3/2012
Posts: 325
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I think that everyone should make their own opinion and not be influenced by reviews of cheap pop magazines.
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Member Since: 10/29/2010
Posts: 29,249
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The A.V. Club
By Genevieve Koski March 27, 2012
The title of Madonna’s new MDNA is working on several levels. There’s the association with MDMA, the already-passé drug of choice among the current crop of nü-ravers who have been steadily influencing the pop charts, and whom MDNA is clearly courting with shiny club-pop that’s begging to be plugged into the playlists of unimaginative DJs everywhere. The title also obviously references Madonna herself, appropriate for an album that spends considerable time reminding listeners of the Material Girl’s legacy: lyrical winks to “Lucky Star” and “Like A Virgin,” a song that essentially repurposes “Ray Of Light,” a Like A Prayer-evoking opening benediction. But the titular acronym can also be read through the lens of evolutionary science as referencing mitochondrial DNA—or rather, Madonna DNA. Though it’s almost certainly not meant to, this interpretation speaks to Madonna’s problematic place in the current pop-music landscape: After three decades of appropriating and propagating contemporary dance- and pop-music trends, Madonna in 2012 is now seeking inspiration from artists (and a fan base) who have never lived in a world where Madonna wasn’t pop royalty. Madonna is such a fundamental part of the genetic makeup of today’s pop music, is it even possible for her to break out of this recursive loop and move her music forward in any meaningful way?
It’s a delicate question that rides on the assumption of pop music as a young person’s game, and invites hacky dismissals rooted in ageism. Then again, it’s hard to overlook the absurdity of a 53-year-old mother of a teenager repeatedly referring to herself as a “girl” on MDNA. Pop is a hard genre to grow old in, arguably more so than rock ’n’ roll or hip-hop, and Madonna’s solution thus far has been to imitate rather than adapt, with generally non-embarrassing results. But the disconnect between Madonna on record and Madonna in person is becoming harder and harder to overlook. We want to believe that musicians would actually listen to the music they make, but it’s tough to imagine the Madonna of today wanting to spend significant time in the sorts of clubs she came up in, for reasons beyond professional obligation. And “obligation” isn’t a word that should be associated with party music—or music of any sort, really—but it’s a feeling that unfortunately permeates MDNA, an album that’s competent, but equally perfunctory.
Madonna herself seems absent from much of MDNA, aforementioned self-referencing aside. Her vocals often get electronically manipulated and buried under big, generic Euro-dance beats, and they step aside for frequent dubstep interludes. And while she’s never been hailed for her lyrical prowess, lazy couplets like “I just wanna get in my car / I wanna go fast and I gotta go far” and Mad Libs statements like “the temperature’s poundin’” (can it do that?) don’t suggest a lot of personal investment in the words she’s singing. Both of those lines come from “Turn Up The Radio,” which actually possesses a great hook underneath a pile of clichés that pulls down what could have been one of the album’s strongest tracks. That’s a problem that extends to most of MDNA, which is filled with okay songs that could have been good-to-great, if not for one or two ill-advised elements.
“I’m A Sinner,” the aforementioned “Ray Of Light” sound-alike, plugs along nicely for the first two and a half minutes, suggesting itself as one of the album’s best tracks—until it reaches a bridge in which Madonna rattles off a list of holy figures paired with the first rhyming word that comes to mind: “Jesus Christ hanging on the cross / died for our sins it’s such a loss”; “St. Christopher find my way / I’ll be coming home one day”; “St. Anthony lost and found / Thomas Aquinas stand your ground.” Similarly, “Gang Bang” starts out as a dark, trancey revenge fantasy that’s more interesting than most of what surrounds it. But the song doesn’t know when to stop. It drones on for five and a half minutes, through a finale in which Madonna screams “Drive, bitch! Now die, bitch!”, signing off with, “Now if you’re gonna act like a bitch, [gunshot noise], then you’re gonna die like a bitch.”
Then there’s her ****-you to her ex, Guy Ritchie: “I Don’t Give A,” which exacerbates the sins of 2005’s “American Life” (in which Madonna infamously rapped about a “double shot-ay” in her soy latte), as she prattle-raps through boasts like “Workin’ out, shake my ass / I know how to multitask” and “Gotta call the babysitter / Tweetin’ on the elevator.” Then, as if to further heighten the song’s “OMG Mom, what are you doing” mortification level, Nicki Minaj steps in with the better of her two guest verses on MDNA (and one of her better features in a while).
The presence of the ubiquitous Minaj, who also joins M.I.A. on the wilted pom-pom of a lead single “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” (“L-U-V, Madonna! Y-O-U, you wanna!”) highlights the odd schism of MDNA, which posits Madonna as a luminary descending from the pop-music firmament to grace today’s musical trends with her legitimizing embrace, but often comes off like compulsory mark-hitting. But that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to post-millennial Madonna, and the only real measure of an album’s success is how well she and her producers sell the charade. While MDNA’s grab-bag of playlist-friendly elements (courtesy of producers like Benny Benassi and Ray Of Light collaborator William Orbit) is too scattered to reach the level of 2005’s Stuart Price-helmed Confessions On A Dance Floor, there are enough moments of euphoria to keep MDNA from flatlining. Oddly, though, a pair of ballads, “Masterpiece” and especially the closer “Falling Free,” constitute some of the album’s best moments, with Madonna’s vocals finally seeming at peace with the electro washes surrounding them. They’re not flashy, boundary-pushing, or even especially modern-sounding songs, but they do feel like songs by Madonna rather than songs featuring Madonna. Given the album’s title and theme, such songs are too few and far between on MDNA.
GRADE: C; 50/100
http://www.avclub.com/articles/madonna-mdna,71434/
*not added to MetaCritic*
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Member Since: 10/29/2010
Posts: 29,249
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MSN EXPERT WITNESS (Robert Christgau)
Forget the four "Deluxe" extras, not one of which except maybe the pretty little "I F***ed Up" improves on the updated '90s arena-dance power tracks of the first 43 minutes, although they top the deadly-dreamy closer "Falling Free" as well as the penultimate "Masterpiece," which begins "If you were the Mona Lisa . . . ." Granted, I could mock "Ooh la la you're my superstar/Ooh la la that's what you are" just as easily. But lyrics have never been where she showed off her gorgeous brains, and anyway, the 10-track mix I propose as an alternative goes out on a real song called "Love Spent": "Hold me like your money/Tell me that you want me/Spend your love on me/Spend your love on me." Nikki Minaj shines bright, but she's no more crucial structurally than the cheerleaders who garnish "I'm Addicted" at its close and embellish "Give Me All You're Luvin'" throughout. Play loud. She's smart and she's proud.
GRADE: A MINUS; 91/100
*not added to MetaCritic*
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Member Since: 10/29/2010
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FACT MAGAZINE (UK)
To fully comprehend the scale of what Madonna attempts to pull off with each release these days, consider this: there are adults out there with no memory of Madonna as a real-time pop cultural entity before 2000′s Music, with no sentimental memory of any of her zeitgeist-redefining, game-changing work over the prior two decades. She’s outlasted all her megastar contemporaries – first in relevance, then in sanity and now literally, with death now showing up on a regular basis to claim legends of the ’80s. No wonder she seems obsessed with youth and immortality – and no wonder each new album seems like more of a tightrope walk.
It’s arguable that she’s never had more to prove than with her twelfth album, MDNA: Madonna has had her successes and failures over the years, but never had she appeared to have so little idea what she should be doing than on 2008′s execrable Hard Candy, a turgid mess of tardy collaborations with the equally past-their-prime Timbaland and Neptunes. But the hope briefly promised by MDNA‘s brilliant triple-punning title was swiftly extinguished by its lead singles, with the leaden ‘Girl Gone Wild’ outdoing the merely throwaway ‘Give Me All Your Luvin’ in sheer misconceived awfulness: the rote, lifeless singing on the former sounds as though a guide track was mistakenly kept on the finished song, and arguably marks the worst vocal performance Madonna has ever committed to record. A track listing featuring titles such as ‘Gang Bang’, ‘I ****ed Up’ and ‘I Don’t Give A’, meanwhile, elicited visions of Lourdes retreating to her bedroom on its emergence and refusing to leave for a week.
If lowering expectations to rock bottom was a tactic, it works: MDNA runs the gamut of quality from ghastly to mediocre to brilliant, but it’s not the unmitigated disaster that many feared. More than anything else, Madonna’s Achilles heel in recent years has been her voice. It’s a cliché to point out that she’s never been the world’s most talented singer, but if nothing else, MDNA illustrates in retrospect why she was a great vocalist. Her infamous mid-’90s singing lessons for Evita notoriously smoothed the rough edges off her scrappy, hungry vitality, but she got away with this over the subsequent decade thanks first to songs that benefited from her new hauteur (‘Frozen’), then thrillingly manipulated electronic vocal treatments (‘Die Another Day’) and finally banging beats that brooked no resistance (‘Hung Up’). But shorn of these tactics, it’s all too apparent that Madonna has been left with a dry, hardened husk of a voice, as rigidly incapable of conveying emotion or nuance as an overly Botoxed face. Too much of MDNA comprises adequate, if basic, bubblegum songs that a teenpop singer with enough moxie could ride to glory; in Madonna’s hands, ‘Turn Up The Radio’ and ‘Superstar’ fall flat. On ‘I’m A Sinner’, she sounds completely uninvested in the concept of sin or the details involved, shrugging “I’m a sinner and I like it that way” on autopilot as woo-oo-oo backing vocals obliviously pop off somewhere in the distance. Madonna is unrecognisable as the woman who made ‘Like A Prayer’ and ‘Erotica’.
MDNA fares better when she’s unrecognisable in different ways. As the chorus of ‘I’m Addicted’ explodes in a glitterbomb of synths, Madonna sinks into the beat and succumbs to glorious anonymity. ‘Gang Bang’ turns out to be one of the highlights, a spare, monomaniacally focused electroclash revenge fantasy in which Madonna, terse and businesslike, intones threats of violence like a cross between a mafia godmother and Miss Kittin. (A decade on, an electroclash revival is surely now acceptable.) Elsewhere, ‘I Don’t Give A’ finds Madonna turn her rigidity to her advantages: she rattles through her daily routine in its verses like a PR girl’s fingernails click-clacking through her multiple Blackberrys, before a Nicki Minaj verse ushers in triumphal synthesised orchestral fanfares.
Elsewhere, there are still obstacles to be dodged: the lyrical clunkers that Madonna fans have long suffered (“You can have the password to my phone” is no one’s idea of a romantic compliment), a few grimly inevitable dubstep breakdowns, the knuckle-whiteningly awful sound of M.I.A. girlishly demanding to be spanked on ‘B-Day Song’. But it’s not MDNA’s missteps, which are balanced by genuinely brilliant decisions, that hasten irrelevancy: it’s the fact that it sounds like the work of an ingénue, but not how Madonna would want it. In telling contrast to the fully-formed, confident shape-shifter with the ability to fully inhabit any role she wanted at will, she now sounds like a woman groping in the dark, occasionally hitting on a trick that works but still unsure of what her voice should be.
Alex Macpherson
RATING: 2.5/5; 50/100
http://www.factmag.com/2012/03/26/madonna-mdna/
*not added to MetaCritic*
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ATRL Moderator
Member Since: 11/22/2010
Posts: 10,782
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Wow...some of these comments are just...ridiculous.
I feel like MDNA was a therapeutic album for her. It seems like there were things she needed to get off her chest and she did on songs like Gang Bang, I Don't Give A, Love Spent and Falling Free. Anyone who says she released this just to make money is either an idiot or pressed.
I've never been a huge "album" fan of Madonna, I'm a singles fan, but MDNA is by far my favorite album of hers in recent memory. Hard Candy was the first album of hers I listened through all the way and loved every song. This is the second one.
Madonna continues to stay in the forefront of pop music because she's adroit. Carefully woven into this pop masterpiece are glimpses into the life of Madonna Louise Ciccone, the woman, not Madonna the pop star. She strikes a delicate balance between the pop queen we all know and love (or love to hate), and the woman who went through a painful divorce and is trying to find love post-heartbreak.
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Member Since: 10/19/2011
Posts: 5,270
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Its like all those new reviewers are pressed she got raving reviews at first (talking about over 4 stars here in average) last week it was alllllllll glowing. and look now.
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Member Since: 11/6/2010
Posts: 8,184
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Is there a list of all Critic Reviews that get counted for Metacritic?
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Member Since: 10/29/2010
Posts: 29,249
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Quote:
Originally posted by Mélina
Is there a list of all Critic Reviews that get counted for Metacritic?
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Music
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Member Since: 10/29/2010
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BEATS PER MINUTE - "MDNA" REVIEW
A few years back, Slant Magazine re-reviewed the much-maligned 2003 Madonna album American Life. An excerpt always sticks with me when I listen to a new Madge record: “In the grand scheme of things, the album might rank as one of the weakest in Madonna’s extensive catalog, and the ones that followed have been as good, if not better, but American Life stands as the last time Madonna seemed to make music without the primary objective of scoring a hit.”
Now, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to assume that any pop star is ever releasing music without trying to score a hit, but the author’s point stands: Madonna’s three subsequent studio albums largely shy away from the musical risk-taking and boundary-pushing that’s made much of her catalog — especially the stretch between The Immaculate Collection and GHV2 — so interesting. With Confessions, she lucked out with a lead single (“Hung Up”) that had both mass appeal and undeniable artistic merit (hell, even Pitchfork included it on its list of the year’s best singles). And the best moments on Hard Candy explored fascinating hybrids of dance-pop and R&B, as on the giddily retro “She’s Not Me” and the paradoxically uptempo balladry of “Incredible.” In both cases, however, lackluster filler tracks outnumbered the highlights, and the latter found Madonna releasing not Hard Candy’s most interesting songs as singles but rather those that seemed to have the most marketability.
With MDNA, her 12th studio LP and first away from Warner Bros., Madonna appears to be following the Hard Candy playbook in terms of promotion, choosing two catchy yet ultimately forgettable tracks to be the album’s first singles, rather than two unique songs that would showcase why Madonna’s still relevant in the first place. Like “4 Minutes,” “Give Me All Your Luvin’” features chart-topping celebrity guests that (presumably) seek to attract a young audience; and like “Give It 2 Me,” “Girl Gone Wild” is catchy yet static, less appropriate for a dance floor than for a Loehmann’s dressing room.
And this new album fails to answer the same question that troubled Hard Candy: what does Madonna herself bring to these songs that a lesser pop star couldn’t? The answer, as it turns out, is not much. Little about MDNA is new or fresh or urgent: we hear Ke$ha’s crunchy synths that have come to dominate top-40 radio; we’re treated to chord progressions almost as tired as the refrigerator-magnet poetry of the lyrics; we get enough half-assed religious allusions to make me wonder whether this is all a stealth marketing campaign for some upcoming reissue of Like a Prayer; and with “Turn Up The Radio,” Madonna gives her own take on the self-esteem-through-pop meme most successfully applied by Katy Perry (via “Firework”). But, I mean, who under the age of 25 still listens to the radio?
As much as I hate to play the relevance card, it’s an unavoidable guiding force on MDNA. “Gang Bang” finds her slipping back into the cartoonish gangster posturing of the Dick Tracy movie, fleshed out with a “dubstep breakdown” about as “authentic” as that which Britney Spears employed on “Hold It Against Me,” which is to say: not at all. I doubt this was her intention, but “Some Girls” accomplishes the unenviable feat of both aping the boastful vibes of “She’s Not Me” and nullifying the girl-power brand the empathetic feminism of “What It Feels Like For A Girl.” Sadly, “Some Girls” is not nearly as exciting as either of those two songs, seeing as how it can’t decide whether it wants to be a generic post-break-up anthem or a personal dig at Guy Richie. As for third-single-contender “Superstar,” well, she opens with a Marlon Brando reference. Whereas Mika cleverly toyed with the old-fashioned associations of Hollywood’s golden age on “Grace Kelly,” Madonna simply uses it as a lyrical placeholder. Other actors referenced include Bruce Lee, John Travolta, and James Dean. Oh yes, there’s nobody the kids love more than John Travolta. “Ooh la la,” indeed.
In fact, it’s not until the eighth track, “I Don’t Give A,” that Madonna finally lets her focus-group-designed guard down. She’s an “ex-wife” arguing about “custody” and regretting not signing a “pre-nup.” She’s also “tweeting in the elevator,” which is surprising to hear, since she’s always let her manager handle her Twitter feed. It’s not the first or last time she references her recent divorce on MDNA, but it’s probably the most direct and thus, at the very least, plausibly relevant. It also — sigh — finds her rapping, which works out as well as it did on “American Life,” which is to say: not at all. Back then, she informed us of how she’s “drinking a soy latte / I get a double shot-ay.” This time around, we listen to her tell us of the difficulties of being a multi-millionaire (and newly-single) mom. Did you know that she has “no time for a manicure”? Famous people: they have problems too!
What saves MDNA from being absolutely terrible, however, is its final three songs, which at least try to bring something new to the table. “Love Spent” intriguingly opens with a banjo solo before launching into yet another post-divorce dance track that’s hardly revelatory but is still better than the mediocrity which precedes it. At least the lyrics are a bit more creative in their use of analogy: “hold me like your money,” she intones. “Frankly, if my name was Benjamin, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.” Ouch. Of course, it follows these lyrical darts with a synth line that blatantly rips off “Hung Up” exactly the same way “Hung Up” didn’t rip off the ABBA song it sampled. Like much of the album, stray synth lines and stuttering rhythms keep this song glued together when it risks running out of momentum, replacing the rewarded patience of, say, Ray of Light with more immediately accessible but ultimately forgettable songs that sound less like the result of organic creative brainstorming and more like “whatever sounds good as a ringtone.”
“Masterpiece,” the album’s first proper ballad, opens with an indisputably stupid line (the Mona Lisa indeed hangs in the Louvre) but is saved by surprisingly resonant processed strings, a refreshingly toned-down finger-snap rhythm, and the kind of enjoyable pathos she used to make “You’ll See” such a huge success back in the day. Closing track “Falling Free” is almost certainly the best thing here, a gorgeous slice of chamber pop that borrows the orchestral flourishes and folksy atmosphere of Nico’s Chelsea Girl. If only the rest of MDNA were as inventive.
Look, I’m a huge Madonna fan. It pains me to write this review. I was really rooting for this album, which I’d hoped would be the confident return to form that Hard Candy was supposed to be. Instead, MDNA feels similarly crowd-sourced and soulless. Part of the joy of her older work is listening to how she took the sounds of the underground club scene of the 80s and early 90s — of which, crucially, she was a part—and made them palatable to mainstream audiences without sacrificing their edgy appeal. But I don’t think Madonna’s a fan of dubstep or four-to-the-floor trance, which makes those genres’ stylistic prevalence on this album all the more disappointing. At least we could tell that she was basking in the strobe-lit glow of Confessions on a Dance Floor. But there’s little of that musical passion here; once again, Madonna has released not a new Madonna album, but rather, a boring pop album that happens to be sung by Madonna. I’d say that MDNA is at the very least “not bad,” but frankly, it’s worse than bad: it’s mediocre. She’s capable of so much better than this… isn’t she?
http://beatsperminute.com/reviews/al...-madonna-mdna/
RATING: 35/100
*not added to MetaCritic*
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Member Since: 10/29/2010
Posts: 29,249
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All Music Guide - "MDNA" Review
Most pop stars reach a point where they accept the slow march of time, but not Madonna. Time is Madonna's enemy -- an enemy to be battled or, better still, one to be ignored. She soldiers on, turning tougher, harder, colder with each passing album, winding up with a record as flinty as MDNA, the 2012 record that is her first release since departing Warner for Interscope. That's hardly the only notable shift in Madonna's life since the 2008 release of Hard Candy. Since then, she has divorced film director Guy Ritchie and has seen her '80s persona co-opted and perverted by Lady Gaga, events so cataclysmic she can't help but address them on MDNA. Madonna hits the divorce dead-on, muttering about "pre-nups" when she's not fiercely boasting of shooting her lover in the head, and she's not exactly shy about reasserting her dominion over dance and pop, going so far as to draft Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. as maid servants paying their respect to the queen. Whatever part of MDNA that isn't devoted to divorce is dedicated to proving that Madonna remains the preeminent pop star, working harder than anybody to stay just on the edge of the vanguard. All this exertion leads to an excessively lean album: there's not an ounce of fat on MDNA, it's all overly defined muscle, every element working with designated purpose. Such steely precision means there's no warmth on MDNA, not even when Madonna directly confesses emotions she's previously avoided, but the cool calculations here are preferable to the electronic mess of Hard Candy, not least because there's a focus that flows all the way down to the pop hooks, which are as strong and hard as those on Confessions on a Dance Floor even if they're not quite so prominent as they were on that 2005 retro-masterwork. MDNA does echo the Euro-disco vibe of Confessions -- "Love Spent" consciously reworks the ABBA-sampling "Hung Up" -- yet as a whole it feels chillier, possibly due to that defensive undercurrent that pervades the album. Even if she's only measuring it in terms of pretenders to her throne, Madonna is aware of time passing yet she's compelled to fight it, to stay on top, to not slow down, to not waste a second of life, to keep working because the meaning of life is work, not pleasure. Naturally, all that labor can pay off, whether it's through the malevolent pulse of "Gang Bang" or the clever "Beautiful Stranger" rewrite "I'm a Sinner," but, ironically for all of Madonna's exhausting exertion elsewhere, these are the songs that benefit from her finely honed skills as a pop craftsman, illustrating that no matter how she combats it, she can't escape her age and may indeed be better off just embracing it.
RATING: 3.5/5; 70/100
http://www.allmusic.com/album/mdna-r2406649/review
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DG1
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