'Pop moments'
Lyrically, the album plays it safe. Madonna may have been inspired to make a documentary about the Aids epidemic in Africa when she adopted two-year-old Malawian orphan David Banda, but you would be hard pressed to find any social commentary in her music.

The main themes are love, revenge, sex and music - subjects on which Madonna surely has very little left to say at this stage in her career.

She even repeats herself, echoing Into The Groove when she sings "Don't you know, can't you see? When I dance I feel free" on Heartbeat.

Then again, Madonna has always been at her best when extolling the virtues of music as a release, and it is on Hard Candy's club-orientated tracks that she excels.

She's Not Me, a Neptunes production, feels like a five-minute musical summary of her career to date.

It kicks off with Chic-esque guitars that are reminiscent of Holiday before morphing into a pulsing club groove that could have been lifted straight from her last album.

Track three, Give It To Me, is already pencilled in as the album's second single. It is one of the record's few out-and-out pop moments, featuring a cute, bouncy beat and a sense of humour that has been missing from Madonna's music since her Dick Tracy days.

"If it's against the law, arrest me, if you can handle it, undress me," she chirps as the song builds to a blistering crescendo that will surely be the highlight of any future live set.

Blistering crescendo
But the song also showcases the fatal flaw in Madonna's battle plan. A middle section where she chants "get stupid, get stupid" instantly brings to mind The Neptunes other female muse, Gwen Stefani.

Similarly, Timbaland's tracks are frequently reminiscent of his (superior) work with Nelly Furtado.
Madonna, a notoriously hard task master (she gave Justin Timberlake a vitamin shot when he appeared to be flagging during recording sessions) seems to have been unable to tame the idiosyncrasies of her omnipresent hitmakers.

Over and over again, she subsumes her pop sensibilities to their arsenal of clattering beats, hollered raps and over-fussy production.

On a ballad like Incredible, the overbearing din of an inexplicable electric guitar completely spoils an otherwise beautiful and delicate melody. It's almost like they threw everything at the wall to see what would stick, without realising it was a very sticky wall.

And that's a real shame because, if a handful of the tracks had been delivered to more producers with a touch more subtlety , Hard Candy could have ranked alongside Madonna's best.

As it stands, however, the album is more akin to Madonna's last attempt to harness the urban market, 1994's underwhelming Bedtime Stories.

Bah, humbug.

Hard Candy by Madonna is released across Europe on 28 April and in the US a day later.