Madonna: Confessions On A Dancefloor

Herald rating: * * * *

There's an art to a Madonna album. It has to redefine the pop queen with more wit and style than a new hair colour.

Yet after the disappointment of the sober American Life in 2003, this didn't seem likely. Add to that her interest in yoga, Kabbalah and moralistic children's books and it seemed the world's most famous singer had forgotten about the enlightenment you can find in a good pop album.

But Confessions on a Dancefloor is exactly the kind of record she needed to make: a bright, fun, trashy, disco-pop confection stacked with guilty pleasures. Why take a crack at the star-spangled banner when you can boogie in a star-spangled leotard?

Working with metrosexual producer Stuart Price, aka Jacques Lu Cont, and Les Rythmes Digitales, Madge owes much of the album's success to her producer and DJ culture. From opening hit Hung Up with its camp sample of Abba's Gimme Gimme Gimme, we're plunged into an early 80s clubbing daze of mirror balls and fabulous, epic, trance-pop anthems, each track segueing into the next.

A world-music rave vibe would make this as at home in Ibiza as it would in Goa, with its throbbing basslines, fuzzy Kraftwerk synths and futuristic, dubby vocals that seem to emanate from - well, everywhere.

Even on I Love New York which boasts the album's worst rhyme - "other places make me feel like a dork" - the vacuous lyrics sit comfortably over a rumbling timpani beat.

They say dance music takes you closer to God - so is Madonna the new God? Her best stuff has always combined hedonism with spirituality - Like a Prayer, for instance - and here she melds her two worlds with cheesy panache.

Future Lovers, where she seductively coos, "Do you want to try?" could be interpreted as a sexual, chemical or divine offer.

Only Isaac, an ethno-trance number about a Kabbalah guru, makes you think of hippies dancing on Thai beaches in neon paint.

The songs where she laments the pitfalls of success and fame are the least appealing but they do expose a side of Madonna we don't often see - a human being who admits to being hurt occasionally by negative comments.

"This is who I am; you can like it or not," is how she signs off. Don't like her attitude? "Then you can f-off".

Confessions is Madonna just the way we love her - bold, glamorous and unapologetic. Just don't go doing yoga on the dancefloor.

Label: Warner