Britney Spears
Femme Fatale

She's been pop royalty since the age of 17, but lately our Britney's been fighting to hold onto her crown with more glamorous and outrageous femmes fatales, the likes of Rihanna and Lady Gaga, delivering stronger and more controversial chart hits. Like the aforementioned, with her seventh studio album, Spears has hijacked the current trend for electronic dance music but has taken it one step further, incorporating elements of dubstep and creating an album jammed with bass heavy, pumping club anthems.

Already, Spears has been hit with much criticism for the prevalence of Auto-Tune on 'Femme Fatale', despite the fact that its recognisable sound has become the norm in this particularly genre. With Britney resorting to miming in recent performances that come across completely dead behind the eyes, it hardly seems like a good strategy to make her voice sound totally soulless too. But the real shame is that it creates a sense of total detachment, particularly on the Will.i.am penned and produced 'Big Fat Bass', where even Britney's spoken voice sounds empty and stripped of any defining character.

Yet in many ways, 'Femme Fatale' is quite a brave record. Not a single standardised ballad interrupts its twelve tracks, with only 'Criminal' waiting until the very end to take the pace down a notch, drawing attention to its bland melody and clunky lyrics. Elsewhere, 'Gasoline' is the only track that bares any resemblance to previous Britney work - a sharp, sexy number that could conceivably have sat on 'In The Zone' or 'Blackout'. The rest are a mesh of 90s dance synths, electronic beats, dub-influenced bass sounds and rap collaborations, almost all of which will have the girls running for the dancefloor.

Some are better than others, of course, with the relentlessly pulsating Ibiza-style sounds of 'Till The World Ends' and 'I Wanna Go' among the more fun tracks on offer. Less successful is 'How I Roll', which uncomfortably blends its childlike "ba da dee dum dum" chorus with lines like "You can be my f**k tonight". And while '(Drop Dead) Beautiful' sounds like Brit's been hanging out with Swedish House Mafia, it allows her to be totally upstaged by up and coming LA rapper Sabi.

So, 'Femme Fatale' doesn't herald the resurrection of the child star turned sex kitten we all hate to love, but it does mark a reinvention of sorts, and as Saturday night filler goes, it's not half bad.

Stream 'Femme Fatale' in full here

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