Pop's queen of reinvention puts a square peg in a round hole, writes Bernard Zuel.
MADONNA, American Life (Warner)
Having a go at fortysomething Madonna for not being as relevant to teens as, say, Britney Spears is pretty silly. Madonna's two previous albums, Ray of Light and Music, were adventurous, grown-up albums that continued her career-long ability to shift ground just when stasis threatened. You don't try to sell that to the kids buying Holly Valance.
Similarly, mocking her for writing about her own life rather than sticking to lyrics about picking up boys in bars and busting poses on the dance floor is fatuous. She isn't 20 any more; she has two kids and a bloke, and enough life experience to have acquired a few insights.
But where it is legitimate to criticise is in the emptiness of those insights and the failure of their delivery.
In the title track, after she lists her voluminous staff and asks, "Do you think I'm satisfied?", Madonna declares: "I'm just living out the American dream/And I just realised that nothing is what it seems." That's about as deep as it gets.
Nobody Knows Me has embarrassing lyrics such as, "I'm not that kind of guy/ Sometimes I feel shy/ I think I can fly/Closer to the sky."
And Mother and Father (which had the potential to be moving, given it's about growing up without a mother) gives us this bogus rhyme: "There was a time that I prayed to Jesus Christ/There was a time I had a mother/It was nice."
Musically, this is a mixed bag. While the album's producer, Mirwais Ahmadzai, is essentially a one-trick pony (stuttering beats under synth bass and cut-up sounds with surprising bursts of acoustics breaking things up), it's a good trick and he pulls it off a number of times, including on the groove-rich Hollywood.
He also gives an unexpected warmth to the love songs Nothing Fails and X-Static Process.
But too often the sounds are let down by Madonna's melodies (which are dull and predictable) her singing (which sometimes seems too remote given the personal nature of the lyrics) and her occasional rapping (which is stiff and unconvincing, like someone who has read about the craft but never heard it performed).
American Life is neither the worst thing Madonna has done nor a complete failure. But it has too many problems to be counted a success.