Rebel Heart

It is a strong, welcome detour in the artist’s recent discography. Or just call it a return to form since the album is her most satisfying effort in a decade and nimbly connects the dots between Madonna’s various eras and guises.

The inventive Diplo is a frequent collaborator, with support from Avicii, Michael Diamond and Kanye, but what’s most impressive is Madonna’s singing.

Along the way, the long, 19-song album offers its share of groaners, missteps and songs more indebted to trendy production than solid craft. But its best moments boast some of the most finely structured pop melodies of Madonna’s 32-year career.

The tone switches dramatically between dynamic contemporary electro groove adventures, singalong pop and lush synthetic ballads, while veering emotionally between introspective vulnerability and strident defiance. Yet every track adheres to robust, classic songwriting principles, a kind of melodious elegance of structure gleaming through no matter how inventively deconstructed the arrangement.

Rebel Heart is not a perfect record--it meanders at lengthy 19 tracks--but it does boast some of the most introspective and lyrics Madonna has ever penned.

Rebel Heart, like its creator, pushes through the pain and, more often than not, lands solidly and with great grace on its feet.

Her best album in the last two decades, "Ray of Light" (1998), was also her most atmospheric and inward-looking. And Rebel Heart is in many ways a distant cousin, an unusually personal album that seems less about keeping up and more about taking stock.

This is Madonna’s best outing since 2000’s Music. [Kyle Anderson's review]

Yet, for all its flaws, there’s something undeniably addictive about Rebel Heart, and even the songs that don’t work so well are still a million times better than anything gathered on MDNA or Hard Candy.

There are times you hope for a little more dumb fun--enter Diplo, who turns up on five tracks with his air horn and Caribbean beats and would be welcome on more--and there's at least one moody ballad too many. But then an aqueous bassline bubbles up and a surge of trance-y pulses sweeps you along to Madonnaland, where introspection and abandon engage in erotic acts of self-actualization.

While Rebel Heart is greatly superior to her last set, MDNA, it suffers from the same malaise of of overabundance.

Rebel Heart is too long, too unnecessarily fussed over, to join the ranks of Like a Prayer, Erotica, and Ray of Light, but tucked inside this lumbering mass of songs are 10 to 12 tracks that would, under any other circumstances, make for Madonna's best album in at least a decade.

The album is at its strongest when Madonna shoves everyone to the side and just tells it to us straight.

Rebel Heart has its fair share of those head-scratchers.... [But] Rebel Heart is a step back in the right direction.

Rebel Heart is chaotic. It’s often amazing, and occasionally crap. If she deleted half of its tracks, it’d be the comeback record she was hoping for.

Rebel Heart is the first Madonna album for a while that's at least as much for listeners as it is for dancers. Sometimes this shines too hard a light on what she has to say. [Apr 2015, p.88]

The album is surprisingly full of acoustic sounds and wistful balladry reminiscent of her 90s material, but it also plugs into a load of dark, restless and weird club rhythms with help from a coterie of in-demand producers.

Ultimately, even in the record's clunkier moments, it's gratifying to hear Madonna leaning defiantly (and gleefully) into what many would consider to be the less savory elements of her personality.

The unseemly segments, where Madonna baits and gyrates, can be a hoot. When she acts her age, it is lacklustre and over-enunciated; lived-and-loved stuff trotted out in overblown ballads.

Rebel Heart is very much the first Madonna album that’s actually about Madonna with a majority of these tracks commenting on her own history and accomplishments with varying degrees of success.

Rebel Heart is that long because it is essentially two separate albums. One is wistful and thick with reflections on failed love affairs and intimations of self-doubt....The other offers dirty talk and defiant I’m-still-here snarls set to EDM-inspired productions, frequently the handiwork of Diplo. There’s obviously no reason why an album can’t contain both. But on Rebel Heart, the two don’t quite gel.

Rebel Heart often strikes a more tentative note.[Apr 2015, p.100]

Rebel heart almost gets the balance right, but at 19 tracks, most in the industrial party-pop style of cheeseball producers Diplo and Avicii, there's simply too much going on. [Apr 2015, p.78]

The funny, creative, outrageous Madonna we’ve known is still in here somewhere. It just takes a lot of patience to find her. [Adam Markovitz's review]

At its best, Rebel Heart has an ease, and a long absent softness, qualities sorely missed since her last masterwork Music. For every godawful moment, which come and go with a sad frequency on Rebel Heart, there are glimmers of virtuosity buried within the overworked mess.

Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses.

Rebel Heart leans too steeply into too many trends at once, making it a scattered affair that flashes between drudgery and brilliance.