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Hard Candy | 
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| Artist: Madonna
Label: Maverick
Category: Music
List Price: CDN$ 15.99
Buy New: CDN$ 9.95
You Save: CDN$ 6.04 (38%)
New (21) Used (3) from CDN$ 8.99
Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 69
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 4.9 x 0.5
MPN: 093624988496
UPC: 093624988496
EAN: 0093624988496
ASIN: B0015D3Z4O
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships within 1 - 2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Super Savings Factory Sealed Ships Suddenly!
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| Tracks:
| • | Candy Shop | | • | 4 Minutes - Madonna, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake | | • | Give It 2 Me | | • | Heartbeat | | • | Miles Away | | • | She's Not Me | | • | Incredible | | • | Beat Goes On - Madonna, Kanye West | | • | Dance 2night | | • | Spanish Lesson | | • | Devil Wouldn't Recognize You | | • | Voices |
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 She's not just going to roll over and die... November 30, 2008
James (Toronto)
...as many of her detractors hope for. Hard Candy is far from being a brilliant album or the best in pop music but she's still miles ahead of the competition. She's still the entire package with great danceable songs with infectious melodies and hard hitting beats.
This is the closest Madonna has been in the new millennium to replicating her early 80s dance image and it appears many are in fear of her being invincible in the industry. Ironically enough everyone appears to want to have the "old" Madonna back and this album has all the qualities of the earlier era of her career.
People now criticize her for teaming up with accomplished producers as opposed to the underground "groundbreaking" sounds she would discover and manipulate to her own advantage. So now she's playing a different game, if not more humbling and now it's become apparently more desperate on her part. Perhaps people would like to consider that Madonna is coming off a hugely successful album "Confessions on a Dancefloor" and wasn't in need of "reviving" her career. Perhaps she actually does appreciate Pharrel and Timbaland's work and wanted to mesh it with her own pop/dance sensibilities. And Hard Candy is living proof of it going according to plan.
Regardless of the critical response the album has received she's still ahead of the game. Michael Jackson is facing yet another trial, Janet Jackson is having problems sustaining a tour, Britney is nuts, etc. No one has been able to play the game as well as Madonna. And whether you pray for her to go away or sit and bicker about her, she's going nowhere anytime soon. So continue to enjoy the ride.
 Not her best November 26, 2008
Kevin Ouellet (Las Vegas, NV)
I kinda this this album is boring !!!!!! 4 minutes is good and this is it !!...
Get up and Shake it!!! November 18, 2008
Paul D. Leney (Calgary, Alta Canada)
O.K. let's drop all the katty bitchiness (as per other reviews). This albumn is just plain good fun. Mads has always known how to stay up-to-date. How else can you remain at the top of Pop Culture after 20 some years? O.K. she is 50 and I did feel she at times like she was trying to trai lafter younger & fresher artists. It was still great music and isn't that what it is all about?
Pure Sugary Delight... August 29, 2008
Alex "M" Twain
It may not be Madonna's best album. But it is so fun and catchy I can't help but like it. Its "Confessions On The Dancefloor" promised to (catchy, poppy...). My favorite tracks on the album are Give It 2 Me, She's Not Me and Incredible.
hard candy, hard to like July 26, 2008
T. Bigney (Nova Scotia, canada)
Madonna is coming home: Having spent a decade working with producers drawn from European club culture, Hard Candy is her link-up with the American men who've come to define global pop. Five songs with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, six with Pharrell Williams, one with Williams and Kanye West. The best, this line-up announces, need to work with the best. But lead single "4 Minutes" doesn't sound like the best working with the best: It sounds complacent, like a pop supergroup high-fivin' each other.
The "4 Minutes" marching band rhythm-riff may be Timbaland's strongest idea on the album but the performers seem happy to let it do the work. He keeps shouting for "Mad-DON-nuh!" but she's a guest on her own track, singing from the margins of what might as well be a Timberlake outtake. Timbaland's productions are the weaker links on this frustratingly ordinary album. Partly he's a victim of his own ubiquity-- we know his tricks by now: the interlocking rhythmic hooks on his upbeat tracks, the bubbling claustrophobia on his ballads. "Devil Wouldn't Recognise You" is the third time-- at least-- that he's written "Cry Me a River", right down to the moody rainstorm breakdown and thunderclaps. But his less-typical productions don't all work well here either: "Dance 2Night" aspires to 80s funk slickness but lumbers where it should cruise.
The 1980s, specifically Madonna's 80s, haunt Hard Candy: It's been touted as a return to the spirit and sound of her earliest work, but her voice and delivery have changed too much for the comparison to hold. Her vocal training and singing lessons in the 90s broadened her range but she's never sounded as hungry since, and her phrasing on Hard Candy is frequently dreadful-- words so evenly spaced and emphasized that it sounds like she's reading aloud to a class. Or teaching you the choruses: You won't get "Miles Away" out of your head in a hurry but that's less to do with its quality than the didactic way she delivers it. Her biggest misstep is "Heartbeat"-- lyrics deliberately reminiscent of "Into the Groove" but sung so detached you might as well be at a Madonna Studies lecture.
The record's better tracks are, unsurprisingly, those where Madonna sounds more engaged. Second single "Give It to Me" has her delivering an imperious lesson on success and survival-- "Show me a record and I'll break it/ I can go on and on"-- over Hard Candy's most urgent tune, hard-pushing electro-ska whose keyboards break up trying to keep pace. Closing track "Voices" is gorgeously gothic orchestral synth-pop that she seems to relax and revel in. Centerpiece "She's Not Me" is a stirring piece of turf-defense, prowling between Chic-era disco and modern pop-house as Madonna slaps down a rival. It's taut and cold, easily Hard Candy's most emotionally compelling moment.
"She's Not Me" smoothly lays out Madonna's credentials: Twenty-five years at the top of the game. She doesn't reinvent pop; she defines it. Her strengths have always been her authority, and her smart sense of who to work with and when. So even if it's a summary of where pop's at rather than where it's going, Hard Candy should still be excellent. After all, if you're not going to do your best work for Madonna, who are you going to do it for? But after listening, the question's still open-- nobody involved in Hard Candy is anywhere near their creative peak.
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