Perhaps Maddy simply has nothing interesting to say any longer, and that's why parading around in a pink leotard seems vaguely ridiculous for her now. The main refrain of Sorry, one of the tracks on gay icon Madonna's new album Confessions on A Dance Floor, has "I've heard it all before" as the sampled refrain. The song will make quite a good single, but it's an ironic summary of most of the album's contents. In today's post-modern pop music landscape, earlier ideas aren't just recycled through osmosis, it's done consciously and deliberately. Is this a bad thing? For the most part, Confessions... is a solid, if disposable, updating of 1980s electro-disco. Madonna has opted for a non-stop mix, with all twelve tracks blending seamlessly together into one complete listen, which works well. Many of the individual tracks struggle to stand out on their own, but as a whole the album has a certain hypnotic intensity, although it fizzles out toward the end. As with several of Madonna's recent albums, it's also another brilliant showcase for her talented European producers. First single Hung Up survives on the strength of its ABBA sample, which is also something of a weakness because it is a constant reminder of the ABBA song's fantastic melody. Isaac is the latest in a long line of recent attempts to incorporate ethnic elements into Madonna's work, but she's no Peter Gabriel. Good production and atmospheres are the hallmarks of the best tracks on the album. Forbidden Love and Let It Will Be put the perennial vocoder to good use, while Get Together is an addictive mix of swirling synths, backward vocals and a driving groove, which helps to overcome its lyrical laziness. Madonna has never been Shakespeare, but in her glory days her words were infused with passion, covering topics of sex, fraught parental relationships, religion, and sometimes all three simultaneously. These days, she's seemingly happy to push empty lyrics about love, dancing and fame with the sort of juvenile insights we've come to expect from teenybopper stars at the American Idol entry level of pop music. Cliches like "better the devil you know" and "do you believe in love at first sight" abound, creating the impression that some of the lyrics have been made up in the car on the way to the studio. The nadir is reached in I Love New York, with its opening line: "I don't like cities, but I love New York – other cities make me feel like a dork". It's as if Madonna has become increasingly cynical as she's got older, so caught up in her desperate bid to be part of the "establishment" that she no longer considers her lowly fans worthy of any insight into what she's really thinking. In a recent Letterman interview, the Material Mum was shown a picture of her feeding chickens outside a mansion in the English countryside and asked if that was her house, to which she replied: "Well, it's one of my houses". She's always had a level of pretentiousness in her work and public persona, but never has that pretentiousness seemed less sexy and more irritating. Perhaps she simply has nothing interesting to say any longer, and that's why parading around in a pink leotard – as she does in the video for “Hung Up” – seems vaguely ridiculous for her now. It has nothing to do with her age, but it has everything to do with her new horse-riding and wannabe-aristocracy lifestyle, complete with fake English accent. Chris Banks - 21st December 2005