‘Confessions II’ review: Madonna’s not-so-secret DJ mix

Madonna’s ‘Confessions II’ dazzles as a club machine. But its real power shows up when she finally stops preaching.

Roughly three tracks into Confessions II, a spoken-word voice comes out of nowhere to correct the record. People treat dance music as superficial, it announces, when the floor is really “a ritualistic space where movement replaces language.” Madonna has preached this gospel for four decades, and she believes every syllable of it. The catch is that a manifesto insisting movement replaces language remains, stubbornly, language. And for much of its first two-thirds, Confessions II keeps telling us that the dance floor liberates rather than building songs that make us feel the liberation. The record narrates its own transcendence in slogans, then trusts Stuart Price’s mix to supply the ecstasy the lyrics merely describe.

The reunion with Price, who architected the 2005 Confessions on a Dance Floor, arrives freighted with a comeback narrative so tidy that the high critic scores might as well be canon. And some of that enthusiasm reads as overdue correction, an apology for years of waving off Madame X and its predecessors far too quickly. The album earns much of the goodwill, though. Yet it also invites a cooler question too many are likely to skip. That is, whether a record this fluent in euphoria has much to confess beyond the pleasure of confessing. And whether the title promises a candor the songs largely defer.

In other words, when Linda Perry recently charged that Madonna chases trends rather than setting them, she mistook the address. The Grindr picture-disc rollout and the album’s frank queer devotion aim at Madonna’s oldest congregation. The clubbers who made her instead of the current pop center. No wonder Sabrina Carpenter makes an appearance in “Bring Your Love,” which oddly doesn’t bring all that much.

The groove keeps priority.

To be clear, the album purrs as a piece of engineering. Price builds a 63-minute continuous mix — a DJ set masquerading as an album — that keeps a single pulse alive from the acid-house throb of “I Feel So Free” through the French-touch glide of “Danceteria.” The opening suite locks a tempo and holds it with kick drums stacked like breeze blocks, filtered synth risers, a sample of Lil Louis’s “French Kiss” surfacing later as homage in place of trend-chasing.

Madonna sings in the deadpan, unbothered register she reserves for records she considers home turf. And Price folds her voice into the low end as one more instrument in the rack, so the groove keeps priority. When the album wants motion, it moves with total authority. Though by the Martin Garrix collaboration “Bizarre” and the four-on-the-floor churn of “School,” the tempo has barely wavered for a half-hour. And the mix starts to read as one very long, very expensive 3 a.m. bender. The trouble surfaces the moment it wants meaning, and reaches for a slogan.

That reach recurs often enough to become a tell. “Good for the Soul” resolves on “no need to explain.” “Love Without Words” offers its own title as a thesis and settles on “the rhythm that set us free.” The interludes keep promising a language beyond language. Madonna the persona here is an evangelist for surrender, and evangelists repeat their creed, right? Here, the creed stays abstract. A greeting-card metaphysics of birds and light and breath that could belong to any wellness playlist.

But Madonna’s genius has always run on specificity. On the sacred-profane collisions, the proper nouns, the way she makes scripture out of private grudges. When she trades that instinct for the universal “we” of dance-of-life boilerplate, the songs turn into beautiful, well-upholstered vacancies.

Madonna’s mood board.

“Danceteria” is the album’s argument in miniature, and also its rebuttal. Over a springy French-touch bassline, Madonna drops abstraction for a roll call — Mark Kamins spinning her “Everybody” demo, Basquiat and Keith Haring and Fab Five Freddy filing past, the downtown train dropping her at the door. It works precisely because it forgets the manifesto and simply testifies, close cousin to “Vogue” in the way it turns a guest list into liturgy.

Here the dance floor earns its mythology through names, dates, sweat. Through evidence rather than assertion. The track towers over its neighbors, and in doing so it quietly indicts them. It gives Madonna a real memory and she raises a cathedral. Give her “the dance of life” and she hands you a mood board.

Which makes the final act a fascinating self-betrayal. As the BPM finally eases, Madonna quits preaching wordlessness and starts using words. “Fragile,” a downcast UK-garage elegy for her late brother Christopher Ciccone, swaps slogans for the plain devastation of “we shared a name, a home.” “Betrayal” litigates her stepmother over shuffling brass. “The Test” hands the mic to her daughter Lourdes and lets a real mother-daughter wariness flicker through the autotune.

“L.E.S. Girl” closes on spare guitar and a boy with a “Marlon Brando face.” It’s the album’s loveliest melody, right when the club goes quiet. This closing suite works in a weird way because it actually distrusts everything before it. Madonna needed language after all. And language, it turns out, was her true confession booth.

Confessions II:The bottom line.

For all its glorious cardio, Confessions II plays best as two records fighting for the aux. It’s a flawless club machine that treats feeling as a rumor, and a smaller, braver album that finally says the thing out loud. Madonna spends an hour insisting the body speaks louder than the tongue. Her last four songs, thrillingly, call her bluff.

“Confessions II” is available now.

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Images courtesy of Warner Records.