Madonna

“Music”

½

Maverick/Warner Bros.Just because you’re Madonna doesn’t mean you’ve got a smash hit. It helps – but only a little.

On her latest collection, “Music,” Mama Madonna, now 42, is at a pivotal point in her career, where youngsters will throw stones, calling her a geezer, and geezers will accuser her of pandering to kids.

In the end, both sides are probably right about Madonna’s “Music,” an album that leaves the singer sitting on the fence between generations.

Everything Madonna does is suspect as a marketing ploy, and this album, the sequel to “Ray of Light,” should definitely raise eyebrows. It’s a disjointed disc that lacks lyrical focus and musical direction.

Music that makes you want to dance in clubs doesn’t go out of style, whether it’s disco, techno, electronica or house.

In that way, “Music” brings Madonna full circle with her youthful beginnings as a dance queen. But Madonna’s michievousness, her vampishness and her signature sense of pop fun are missing in the lyrics and their adult themes.

Like the Tinman in the “Wizard of Oz,” Madonna’s “Music” needs heart to add to her brains and courage.

As techno whirls and loopy frequencies buzz – courtesy of French music programmer Mirwais Ahmadzai – Madonna lets reality and expectations crash.

It is artfully done in a few instances – as on “Impressive Moments,” where she describes the creation of the universe, singing lines such as: “Cosmic systems intertwine, astral bodies drip like wine, all of nature ebbs and flows.”

Another one of the disc’s more interesting songs, “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” is a study in the contradictions and conflicts that a strong female must endure.

It’s the kind of song that will be ignored because it doesn’t throb with a dance beat, and doesn’t crackle and snap with a pop aesthetic, but the encoded autobiography of her well-spent youth is one of the better exercises in serious music that Madonna wrote for this disc.

While most of “Music” is a symphony in synthesizers, the finger-picked guitar that supports “Don’t Tell Me” is a risky acoustic oasis. Even after a dozen spins, that track is still a standout.

It isn’t that the synth-heavy leanings on the rest are bad or hurt the project, but the complicated, multilayered electronic production would leave anyone wondering how much Madonna actually had to do with the creation of “Music” – other than being the central vocal instrument of the record.

So do you buy “Music?” No.

“Music ” is miles from Madonna’s best effort. It isn’t playful, ambitious, controversial or musically inventive, and sets no sonic trends. But that won’t matter to her legions of fans.

WILLIE NELSON

“Milk Cow Blues”

½ Island/Def Jam Records

He’s recorded more than 200 albums, and lived 67 years on the planet – it’s hard to believe there are any debuts left for music icon Willie Nelson.

Yet today, this outlaw, a national treasure, again treads the less-traveled path with a 15-song collection of sweet ‘n’ low blues classics and slow burners glowing with the 12-bar treatment.

“Milk Cow Blues” is an instant classic. Although only a few of the songs get the full-Nelson, the other tracks are duets with acknowledged blues royalty such as B.B. King, Jonny Lang, Dr. John, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Susan Tedeschi.

Nelson’s talk-’em-sober singing style is world-weary on this wonderful album and even approaches sexy when he does duets with blues babe Tedeschi on his own “Crazy” (the song Patsy Cline made famous a lifetime ago). Nelson and King are also naturals together on King’s signature song, “The Thrill Is Gone.”

While stylistically this is a very pretty blues disc, it would have been nice if Willie had penned a new tune or two for this collection. Still, the selections are good. There isn’t a dog in the batch of smoky nightclub songs.

TERRI CLARK

“Fearless”

Mercury Records

In the five years since Canadian cowgirl Terri Clark released her debut, little has changed. That should please her fans.

Clark’s standard country attack, which blends acoustic elements (such as strummed guitars and plucked banjos) with drum loops, synthesizers and occasional pedal steel, suits her earthy voice. The songs, eight of them Clark creations, are introspective confessionals that get only a little sappy.

On “No Fear” (from which the title is gleaned), Clark is powerful as she sings about what a girl wants, with lyrics like, “I want peace, love and understanding/A stogie and an ice cold beer/Don’t want to live afraid of dying.”

How can you not like a girl who can distill the essence of good living in so few words?

Although she’s a fine writer and performer, the music isn’t all that original. A number of the songs sound so generic, they could be mistaken for tunes from Lorrie Morgan, Pam Tillis or Matraca Berg.

The co-writing credits with Mary Chapin Carpenter on “Fearless” don’t help, either. The songs are so strongly marked by Carpenter’s style that you forget it is Clark’s disc.

Her best on this dozen-track collection is the clean-slate, kiss-off road song, “A Little Gasoline.” The combination of bluegrass fiddles and vocal twang is fantastic, and to some will be worth the price of the album.