The Queen and the Jester

HIGH NOTES

Never mind her torso-twisting, 70s-hued image makeover, it's really quite irrelevant. I mean, even if she were to pounce around in a kangaroo suit attempting to bite people, the music would still take precedence. I'm listening to the new Madonna album, Confessions On A Dance Floor, and I can't help but think that this here is what pop legend is made of.

But before we put Confessions in a time capsule and cast it as the sole representative of our musical era, let's put things into perspective a little more. There is one, and only one, simple reason why Confessions will make its way to a large and undivided audience "" it has mass appeal.

The whole production, from the infectious Abba-driven first single "Hung Up" to a more blatant rant about why the diva loves New York on the song "I Love New York" on to the spiritually derived "Issac", is one big haul of giddy, uninhibited beat cliches. But Confessions still packs in enough surprise and musical intelligence to appeal to the most gullible and scathing music critics alike.

You could easily use an album like Confessions to define pop(ular) music. It's easy, it's enjoyable and, best of all, it's got musical dedication and enough will-power to make you want to run home to listen to it after a long day in perfectly bad company.

The intention, like much other great pop music, is mindful of what it says, keeping things simple and relying heavily on synth patterns and innovatively processed sounds (courtesy Stuart Price aka Les Rhythmes Digitales) that help you ride the wave of vague blissfulness with as little fuss as possible. In its very design, Confessions is a dance album at its best that has rampant attitude only second to its ability to block out every speck of reality.

Having played out every existing role in the pop culture game book from Penthouse model to social commentator, Madonna's is one disco inferno that just keeps getting brighter and brighter and brighter.

And speaking of role playing, it's a little unnerving to see the world's greatest entertainer Robbie Williams turn a new leaf in his album, Intensive Care. It really is a wonder how the world's most celebrated bachelor suddenly goes pining romantic in true Shakespearean style.

Tragedy or not, you ask? Well, that's for you to decide. Robbie ol' boy makes it quite apparent that he has been bitten by the bug that befriends every living bachelor at some point or the other. As it turns out Robbie has been taking stock of his unhealthy ways and finally wants to go straight. We hear Robbie in soliloquy mode on the song "Make Me Pure", "Smoking sells/ Sex sells/ I know I'm going to die so my revenge/ is living well."

Intensive Care is a truthful name for this album in every sense. Robbie is at this point in the midst of what we everyday people might call a pre-mid-life crisis. It took him two years to make this album; in that time you can tell that he really has done a bit of growing up.

But in his new-found sobriety, it seems that the butt of it all is that Robbie's rather tired of the one-off romps that populate his starry life. Here's a man in search of love and someone to come home to. "Into the night/ Searching hard/ Look for the light/ Of love...I sing from the chaos in my heart," he sings on the bitterly optimistic "King Of Bloke And Bird".

Musically and lyrically Intensive Care presents a Robbie that we have never seen before. His showman status shelved at present, there are all sorts of things going on on this album. And if you listen closely enough, you can hear it all beating to Robbie's heart.