REVIEW! Madonna - Rebel Heart

The Super Deluxe Edition cover

I took my time reviewing this CD. Not that it's bad or difficult to review, but because I wanted the music to filter my soul and find hooks in my being. Rebel Heart is undoubtedly the Queen Of Pop's best work in her long career. Forget about Hard Candy or MDNA, this CD should have been a follow-up to Madge's CD, Confessions on a Dance Floor. It sit perfect next to Confessions. You get a bit too old and new on Rebel Heart. A mix bag of pop, EDM, hip-hop, drum & bass and some reggae beat as well. Lyrically Madge touch on the same themes of her previous music - love, hate, sex, religion, and this is maybe the only downside of the CD. Not that down, but still it lacks some originality. She incorporate lyrics from her best known hits on some of the song. But in the end, looking at the CD as a whole, it works. I always find it hard to pin point the best track on the CD, and on Rebel Heart is the same. It's such a diverse CD with so many sounds and genres mix together, but my conclusion is that the out of the whopping 19 tracks, the song Veni 'Vidi Vici' incorporates all the sounds and genres on this CD and it's a ‘flippin’ cool track. Of course now begs the question, with Madonna going on tour later this year with Rebel Heart, will she finally tour South Africa? She has shunned her South African fans for like in forever. So here is hoping she'll visit the Motherland this time around.

What the rest said:

The Daily Telegraph writer Neil McCormick, Saeed Saeed of The National, Andy Gill of The Independent, Lewis Corner of Digital Spy and Lauren Murphy from The Irish Times all gave the album 4 out of 5 stars. McCormick felt that "For the first time in years, Madonna doesn't sound desperate", praising it in comparison to Hard Candy and MDNA.

Saeed called it "a fine collection of sturdy pop tunes in which Madonna finally allows herself to look back and sometimes pilfer from her peak periods of the late 80s and early 2000s". Murphy wrote "the indisputable pop icon is back with a tentative bang" after MDNA had "few memorable pop hits".

For Gill, the most impressive factor about Rebel Heart was Madonna's vocals, while it was described as "some of Madonna's most captivating work in years] by Corner. A four out of five star rating was also given by Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic, who found Rebel Heart to be a revival of Madonna's defiant side and her confessional mood.

Writing for The Quietus, Amy Pettifer praised the album, describing it as "a darker return to the club culture roots for Madonna, and it seems – on some level – to face up to the missteps of her more recent releases." Jim Farber from New York Daily News also gave a positive review, deeming Rebel Heart boasting with "some of the most finely structured pop melodies of Madonna's 32-year career"