MADONNA
Confessions II (Warner)
Madonna occupies that rarified space in music where we all come of age in one of her different eras. For me, that was Confessions On A Dancefloor, and to get a snapshot of why that 2005 album is so lauded, just take a look at the epic length of the Wikipedia page for the title track alone.
Naturally, legacy sequels come with double doses of excitement and trepidation – and while I think the glitter will have to settle over the years for us to assess Confessions II as a true masterpiece or not, for now at least it double-downs this candy-pink, disco-infused version of the Pop Mother Superior as being as important as her Vogue or Ray Of Light periods.
As with the original Confessions, each track here flows into the next to create an immersive dancefloor odyssey with a beginning, middle and end. This journey opens with I Feel So Free, an invitational warmup with a strong I Feel Love undercurrent, before One Step Away sashays in to deliver Madonna’s spoken word thesis on the nightlife culture that was so foundational for her: “People think that the dancefloor is just superficial / But they’ve got it all wrong / It’s not a place, it’s a threshold, a ritualistic space where movement replaces language.”
Returning to the here and now, Bring Your Love’s whispery back-and-forth between Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter (another bottle-blonde bombshell who has intellectualised the entrepreneurial art of selling one’s sexuality in pop music) isn’t as sharp-edged as the former’s brilliant collaboration with Britney Spears, but still stylishly follows the grand tradition of certified pop royalty anointing the next generation.
Danceteria is where the shined-up glitterball energy swells and peaks, before the middle portion of CII is heralded by Latin-flavoured Read My Lips, featuring Spanish verses from Feid for the bona fides. Madonna might hair-flippingly proclaim she “don’t give a fuck” ahead of the skanky drop on Everything, but she mellows into a purr on the bouncy Love Without Words – “Call it house, call it trance, call it love without words” – then laments a sordid love affair on punchy, melodramatic tango, Bizarre.
School begins the comedown: a more experimental, minimalist number of staccato electro and hushed promises. Fragile continues this feel with Y2K-trendy breakbeats and crisp, melancholic strings and harmonies harking back to late-90s cybergoth lullaby Frozen. My Sins Are My Saviour is a cool pitstop as the nighttime air hits sweaty skin, with extra Euro-chic street cred courtesy of Belgium’s Stromae.
Slinking into the downtempo jazz noir of Betrayal, the tailend of CII finds the pop dame at her most unguarded: the latter track thought to be directed at her late stepmother, who will “never replace” her real parent, while The Test flips Madonna from imbittered child to grateful mother, duetting with daughter Lourdes Leon for a twinkling moment of joyful appreciation. The closer, L.E.S Girl (as in Lower East Side) is the final sigh as the head hits the pillow, the sun comes up, and “everything fades away.” It sounds like we’re eavesdropping on a private conversation between two Madonnas: today’s untouchable icon now and the fledgling musician who danced her way from her large Italian family in Detroit to solo fame in 1980s New York. It’s also akin to a diarised companion piece to Jump, from the first Confessions, where she repeated the mantra “I can make it alone” enough times for it to become true.
Confessions II isn’t so much a coy love letter to the culture, music, and people that Madonna built herself on, but a full-on wedding, complete with transcendental testimony to the dancefloor on which she continues to mop with her contemporary pretenders. The true triumph, however, is that a performer five decades into her career isn’t plundering past gold for recaptured glory, but building on it for present-day rejuvenation. And in two decades, Mother Madge has never sounded better.
words HANNAH COLLINS
