Honestly, sometimes we wonder why Madonna even bothers making albums anymore.

No, we're not suggesting she should retire. We mean albums opposed to singles. Which, as anybody knows, are Madonna's bread and butter. Ever since she first danced her way on to the pop charts with 1983's Lucky Star, Madonna has expressed herself most successfully -- financially and artistically -- through a never-ending string of chart-topping hits that are far more memorable than the albums that contained them. (Quick, which disc was Papa Don't Preach on? True Blue? Like a Virgin? Like a Prayer? For the record, it's the first one, but unless you're a Madonnaphile, we bet you had to look it up just like we did.)

Lately, the situation has become even more pronounced. Unlike the old days when the Material Girl could be counted on to deliver three or four hits per album, her more recent discs have begun to fall into a pattern -- one massive single and a dozen or so tracks of filler nobody remembers six months later. (Quick, name a song from Ray of Light besides the title track. Nope, not Beautiful Stranger -- that was a single. Ditto American Pie. We rest our case.)

Unfortunately, Madonna's eighth studio album, the imaginatively titled Music, is another lopsided effort. It kicks off with the addictive, groovalicious Parisian disco bounce 'n' squiggle of the title track, which is easily one of her best tunes in years. Like the best timeless tracks, it's almost minimalist in construction -- a plain beatbox, a two-finger synth melody, a handful of words and one absurdly simple, impossibly happy message: Music makes the people come together.

If only the rest of Music followed that naively upbeat template. Instead, it slowly heads downhill, losing energy like a raver as the night wears on and the Ecstasy wears off. Admittedly, Madonna's tossoff tracks are often better than most pop act's keepers; still, that isn't enough to make Music bring anybody together. The first few tracks, Impressive Instant and Runaway Lover, stick with the swirly Eurodisco program, with Madonna allowing her voice to be bent, folded, twisted and mutilated by banks of vocorders, synthesizers and auto-tuners. In a Cher-meets-Giorgio Moroder kinda way, it's cool enough that you start to think Madonna just might be on to something. Then, for some reason, she abruptly gets out of the groove with I Deserve It, a mea culpa folktronica ballad for midtempo drum machine, gently strummed acoustic guitar and siren-like '70s synthesizers.

After that, Music never quite recovers. Amazing, with its psychedelic raga-pop buzz, is OK, although it's essentially a rewrite of Beautiful Stranger. Nobody's Perfect is another watery synth ballad. Don't Tell Me is another acoustic-guitar strummer (co-written with brother in-law Joe Henry), but with a zippier beat and a cut-and-paste background. The last three tracks, What it Feels Like For a Girl, Paradise (Not for Me) and Gone, each seem slower than the last, until Music finally coasts to a halt after just 45 minutes like a ship that has lost the wind.

But before you write off a Madonna purchase this year, here's an alternative: The extended-single version of Music. There are a couple of different ones floating around -- a four-track version and a nine-track monster. If you can find it, go for the latter. It has a nonet of different remixes of Music -- from recognizable radio mixes by HQ2 and Victor Calderone to epic-length dance and drum 'n' bass excursions by Deep Dish, Groove Armada and The Young Collective. By comparison, its wall-to-wall grooves make the album seem like the droopy, inconsistent affair it is. Plus it's a full half-hour longer and costs about half as much.

With all that going for a single, who needs an album?

Track Listing Music
 Impressive Instant
 Runaway Lover
 I Deserve It
 Amazing
 Nobody's Perfect
 Don't Tell Me
 What It Feels Like For A Girl
 Paradise (Not For Me)
 Gone