Madonna - Hard Candy (2008, Warner Bros.)

3 out of 5

Striving for relevance or artistic reinvention? Well, with Madonna it's never really been that easy. Some might argue that Madonna has always been relevant, and some might argue that this is absolutely not a reinvention. After all, what have most of her albums been if not dance records?

So, despite the fact that half of the songs here mention "Madonna" by name (and she sings "My name" in one of the others), and despite the incredibly obvious and prominent production by celebrity hit-makers Pharell Williams and Timbaland, it's not that hard to tell who this is. We've been listening to Madonna's voice for the last 25 years (how crazy is that?) so one would hope we'd be able to pick it out by now. The problem is that from the sound of them, a lot of these tracks could have just as easily been sung by that other bottle-blonde pop-princess produced by Pharell, Gwen Stefani (for the sake of this review, let's pretend that Britney Spears doesn't exist...she seems to stay out of trouble better that way).

That said, the aforementioned production really steals the show, as it has with most of the other artists that Pharell and Timbaland have worked with. And a lot of it is great. But, this whole record is full of the typical bass-and-brushes beats that are uniquely poised to piss of the neighbors at even a reasonable volume, and not necessarily in a good way, either. It's actually one of the biggest detriments to the record, even in songs where the melody is in the forefront.

Speaking more specifically of the songs themselves, most of them are pretty good if you can get past the beat beating. Almost every song is about dancing or sex (or dancing as a substitute for sex), and each song has a decidedly engaging rhythm. "Dance 2Night" combines 70s Funk and Disco with very Madonna-friendly 80s synthesizers, and "She's Not Me" is really just straight up Studio 54 with slightly updated beats. The first single, "4 Minutes," even with its oddly flatulent (Madonna is in her 50s....), electronic marching band sound, is incredibly catchy, if annoying at times (especially Justin Timberlake's post chorus rap-scat ending with "mud-on-AH?" and the ever-repeated "tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock"). And speaking of annoying, "Give it 2 Me" (who named these songs? Prince?) sounds like a bunch of ravers took a circus hostage with their glow-sticks. Not to mention Madonna's plea to "Get stupid, get stupid, get stupid, don't stop" isn't nearly as entertaining as the pre-NBA-appropriated cry of the Black Eyed Peas' "Get Retarded."

But, by far, the worst songs on the record are the first track, and almost title track, the vaguely-Japanese-sounding "Candy Shop," which has some of the worst lyrics and rhymes I've heard in a long time ("Come on into my store, I've got candy galore"), and the late-album "Spanish Lesson," wherein Madonna gives a "sexy" lesson in Spanish words and phrases. At least she's not singing in a faux-British accent, though her faux-Spanish isn't much better.

Thankfully it's followed-up by the best song on the album, "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You," one of the best songs Timbaland has ever had a hand in, which combines water-drop beats with plaintive piano, folky finger-plucked acoustic-guitar and a surprisingly non-cheesey (or at least, not too cheesey) thunderstorm breakdown. Okay, I can't really say that. It's incredibly cheesey, but the rest of the song makes up for it.

The next, and final song on the record, "Voices," (with the line, "Who is the master and who is the slave?") kind of raises another point in the "theme" of the record and that's that it all has a vaguely BDSM tone, something that Madonna's "sexy-boxer-in-dominatrix-boots" outfit on the cover doesn't help with, and neither does this picture that made the internet rounds, recently:

I guess we know who wears the pants in that relationship (or at least the pants that have a bedroom prosthetic attached), even if on this record, it seems like Pharell Williams and Timbaland are wearing the pants. But maybe that's just because Madonna's taken them off to be provocative.

=james