Why you can’t write off Britney
Britney Spears: Glory (RCA) Verdict: Pop with growing pains ★★★✩✩
HAILED as the future of pop when her 1998 debut Baby One More Time made her a household name, to say Britney Spears has endured a troubled transition into adulthood might be the understatement of the century.
Once the world’s best- selling teenager, she is now a 34-year-old working mother-of-two who has come through divorce, rehab, public breakdowns and an eccentric phase in which she lopped off her trademark blonde locks with clippers.
Mercifully, there have been encouraging signs that she is now on a more settled path. A Las Vegas residency and her TV comeback at last weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards were well received — even though both were accompanied by familiar lip-synching claims. There are more reasons to be guardedly cheerful on Britney’s ninth album, which accelerates her move away from bubblegum fare towards a more mature sound. Glory follows musical trends too slavishly to be groundbreaking, but it’s a step in the right direction after the disappointment of 2013’s drab Britney Jean.
Spears said in March she was ‘being more hands-on’ this time. Just how much involvement that entails is debatable, given that Glory’s languid hooks and rhythms were shaped by a large team of writers and producers.
Britney’s voice, too, has been so heavily coated with auto-tune and other effects that the homespun, Southern twang prominent on her earlier releases has been erased.
She sings in new ways here, from a breathy falsetto to a gritty, urban grunt, but any idiosyncrasies have been largely obliterated.
Machine-tooled or not, the moody, slow- burning grooves of Glory should be enough to keep her in the game. With such a rollercoaster life story, she should have plenty to sing about, but the lyrics — with five songs co-written by the star — are depressingly one- dimensional, repeatedly casting her as a rapacious sex kitten.
Bringing sexy back is one thing, but some more personal touches wouldn’t go amiss.
She is modest enough on Do You Wanna Come Over? — ‘I could get into that kissing and touching, or we could be good and do next to nothing’ — but Invitation sees her imploring her squeeze to ‘ put your love all over me’. And when she sings, on Make M e . . . , about being impatient to ‘take it back to my room’, it’s a fair bet she isn’t talking about Domino’s pizza. And then there is the woeful Private Show, which finds her playing a burlesque dancer inviting onlookers to ‘slide down my pole, watch me spin it and twerk it’ to the accompaniment of a clicking camera. There is welcome relief in the subtler songs. Just Like Me addresses jealousy, and there is heartache at the core of Man On The Moon, its sense of longing enhanced by guitar and vibraphone. There’s a passing reference to her past, too: Clumsy finds her exclaiming ‘ Oops!’ every time the song slows, a clear allusion to her 2000 single Oops !. . . I Did It Again. That came from a time when she was pop’s undisputed prom queen, with Christina Aguilera her only rival. The dais is pretty crowded these days, but Britney is showing sufficient staying power to suggest it would be churlish to write her off just yet.