Britney Jean perhaps more than any other album this year had a mountain of expectation to try and overcome.
Spears herself called it her most personal record and on paper, since she has a co-write credit for every song on the album, it should easily surpass her previous efforts in that sphere. Unfortunately her personality as an artist, defined most strongly by a long-term partnership with hit-maker Max Martin, has been cast aside by the overbearing executive production by will.i.am.
That isn’t to slam all of will.i.am’s work on Britney Jean. He’s delivered a classic Brit banger in ‘Work Bitch’ gets things right on ‘Til It’s Gone’, which other than a spelling error is a dominating piece of dance. ‘You’ll never know what you got, til it’s gone,’ Brit chants over swirling Eurodance production with lyric that prove eerily prophetic for the dance drivel that follows.
‘Body Ache’ is a painful piece of dance-floor-whore-pop that is frankly embarrassing considering the quality dance Britney knocked out on her last album Femme Fatale. Likewise her collaboration with will.i.am, ‘It Should Be Easy’ is a cringey, guitar-flecked piece of generic garbage and sees Britney at her auto-tune-slathered worst. Special mention for the worst track on the album though goes to Spears’s collaboration with her sister Jamie Lynn on ‘Chillin’ With You’. It’s a bizarre rip-off of the Lumineers ‘Ho Hey’, mixed in with any number of Rihanna album filler tracks and then adds in a supremely random Nelly Furtado-style breakdown. The result is fairly horrific.
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Things aren’t all bad though and if you were willing to sift you’ll find some of that personality that Britney was talking about. ‘Passenger’ finds her oddly vulnerable over guitar-underscored beats. “I’ll let you lead the way now, cause I want you to take the wheel, I’ve never been a passenger though, I’ll let you take the wheel,” Britney confides, almost making you think she’s singing about putting the album’s fate in will.i.am’s hands.
Personality in terms of reflection is to be found in ‘Alien’. Britney harks back to days past, opening, “There was a time, when I was one of a kind.” It’s a profound statement, and all the more beautiful since you can actually hear Brit’s raw vocal on it. Likewise ‘Perfume’ lets Britney’s vocal shine as she laments a boyfriend’s infidelity; “I’ll never tell, but I hope she smells my perfume.”
The best track on the album by a mile though is ‘Don’t Cry’. The vocal easily matches ‘Everytime’ and the production is sublime. There’s an insanely catchy whistle refrain and Britney just sounds so alive on the track. It’s intensely emotional and there’s overt personality behind it. “Our love is gone, but I’ll survive, hide my tears and dry my eyes,” she states assertively, and it’s fitting that it closes the album.
Britney Jean hasn’t delivered nearly half as much as was anticipated, but then it had a bigger mountain to climb than most. The momentum built up by the dazzling dance tracks of Femme Fatale has been squandered by bungled production from will.i.am but Spears’s decision to depart from her comfort zone with Max Martin’s production is to be commended. Indeed, despite the generally poor production, there are at least five veritable hits here and songs that Spears should rightly be proud of and can attach the personality label to. Those tracks represent a transition from Britney in her twenties to Britney in her thirties and see her step away from her identity uncertainty between Blackout and Femme Fatale. Unfortunately though, five tracks do not an LP make. There are too many dud songs and lazy production here for any comparison to Ray of Light to be really justifiable in entirety. The maturity and progression in the five good songs though, shows that Brit’s own speculation on retirement after her Las Vegas residency is misplaced and can be cast aside: there’s more to come with Brit and it’s the next album we should all keep our eyes on.