Damn, these songs clean up nice. [joke avoided]
OK, first impression is that Britney is giggling and whispering and threatening in the corners of every track here -- it's a very intimate album, much more so than anything else she's ever done by a longshot. "Piece of Me" is vicious, "Heaven" is still beautiful, but it's actually a little bit lighter somehow in its non-demo version (still love that line, somewhere between old-skool teenpop pretension and the Pixies..."fall off the edge of my mind for you" -- and there's the matter-of-fact whisper.
Anyway, she's carrying over that vibe of letting you in a little closer from "And Then We Kiss," with a healthy dose of low-key batshitness. Dance-confessional lives! (Also see: the leaked tracks from the new Veronicas album, which are totally breakneck thump-thump club bangers, and they're still angsty and shit.)
Also, I'm delighted to see that Paris Hilton is feeding right back into the ex-teenpopper gene pool. (They've been hanging out, right?)
"Freakshow" starts kinda like Lady Sov's "Random," keeps it weird and spare. More army-of-Britney, works about as well with Britney keeping it cool as it did with Paris keeping it the only voice she could do. At least as weird as Janelle Monae, very funny! This sounds like it was a (cheezy laser-gun) blast to record (esp. "Hot as Ice," previously "Cold as Fire").
I'm not sure if anyone's brought up Eminem's Encore as a comparison point for Britney at this point in her career (musically), but the comparison keeps coming up for me (not just because she's got a "Toy Soldier" track on here). Difference being that Britney going off the rails musically is exciting as compared to the rest of her (occasionally off-the-rails-ish but usually 100x bigger and more sure of itself), whereas with Eminem it was just a sort of bizarre detour off the road becase...like, what else was he going to do? (He hasn't gotten back ON the road since then, either.) But Britney has plenty of room to go weird, go personal, go on the DL a little, try things out, fail spectacularly (which she hasn't done here, though plenty of it is pretty strange, esp. for her).
What would have been a disaster is if she'd try to out-Britney herself as always (she already got her Big Britney Hit from Left Field in 2003, anyway, and no one particularly gave a shit about her baggage then, did they?) That's kind of what I take from the VMAs performance -- low-key song, low-key performance (botched), and the biggest disappointment wasn't that she was so listless, so whatever, but that you couldn't really imagine it being BIG BIG BIG even if the performance had been flawless. It was low-rent, and she fucked it up.
Well, whatever. She seems to have had her hand held pretty tightly until now (productions being melted down and reformed her persona), and she's kind of delightfully in over her head here; sometimes the beats swallow her whole. Sometimes they go for the Paris technique and make mountains out of molehill-style vocals, and the beats STILL kick her ass. But in her own way she's just as on-target as ever, in fact more on target -- every single song on this album is good, and I happen to know there's at least one or maybe two other songs not even on here. In fact, her consistency doesn't come close until now, even if the peaks are way lower -- maybe In the Zone, but there are a few duds on that one. Certainly not her first three albs (and I'll take her half gold half shit albums over Zone).
What I'm saying is, this is Britney Spears's best album.
I'm not sure if I'm ready to say that yet.
No, yes. I am. This is it. This is her best album.
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