'Love Spent', an Orbit production with brittle electro-acoustic accompaniment, at least approaches the topic from an interesting angle, focusing on the tension and power dynamic of a relationship in which one half of the couple drastically out-earns the other. Madonna reckons with her divorce from Ritchie elsewhere on the record, but her attempts to address lingering bitterness and affection for her ex are so remote that the songs have all the soul of a carefully edited press release. It's the album's boldest, most experimental track, and it's marred only by a just-off vocal performance that renders her very familiar voice a bit anonymous, and a half-hearted attempt at a dubstep bass drop. The title suggests porn, but it's really a nod to mobsters, particularly as her over-the-top, Ana Matronic-esque monologue turns especially violent and bloody. The most interesting of the Orbit productions is 'Gang Bang', a campy revenge fantasy that essentially uses her filmmaker ex-husband Guy Ritchie's sub-Tarantino aesthetic as a weapon against him. 'I'm a Sinner' is a serviceable rewrite of their Ray-era soundtrack hit 'Beautiful Stranger', and 'Falling Free' plays to her strengths as a singer of ballads, though it lacks the generous hooks of, say, 'Take a Bow' or 'Live to Tell'. The Orbit collaborations mainly call back to their work together on Ray, the record that essentially established the aesthetics of the singer's past decade of music. 'I'm Addicted', a dynamic electro throbber by the Benassis, is the big keeper here, and their work on 'Girl Gone Wild' yields a reasonably strong single that rises to the challenge of competing with Ke$ha, Britney Spears, and Katy Perry on pop radio. and William Orbit, the principal architect of her 1998 album Ray of Light, are much better, if not up to par with previous career highlights. Madonna's tracks with house duo the Benassi Bros. (Sorry ladies, Rihanna beat you to that frosting-licking line.) The latter track, a collaboration with M.I.A., is horrifically regressive, the sound of two of pop's great feminist provocateurs joining forces for what amounts to a tacky children's song about birthday parties spiced up with a couple of tired double entendres. The worst of these numbers were produced by French DJ Martin Solveig, whose anonymous, unimaginative arrangements for 'Turn Up the Radio', 'Give Me All Your Luvin'', 'I Don't Give A', and 'B-Day Song' are paired with excessively bland lyrics. Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal, coming across not so much as bad pop songs per se, but as drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes. Madonna has made her share of bad music in the past, but for the most part, her failures have come from taking artistic chances that didn't pay off, as on her experiments with hip-hop on American Life and Hard Candy.

Madonna discography wikipedia