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.