Review - Britney Spears – Femme Fatale

With her seventh studio release, Britney Spears has clearly taken a new direction with Femme Fatale, moving primarily into the dance and electro pop scene in the process. Lead single Hold It Against Me is a genius song, with the dance beats being well and truly out in force, and at times sounding huge, as the pulsating thump hits, and hits hard. The way it freaks out into the dubstep influenced breakdown is also a big moment, on one of the stand out tracks of the year thus far. Britney was well and truly back.

Her next single Till The World Ends is equally as big a track, and although I wasn’t too sure on first listen when it first came out, it has well and truly converted me. The video is also not too shabby (see later post on that!). It seemed as though she had crossed over, and in some style too. Sure she had some electro moments on the last record, but this was a move forward with the times, and with the zeitgeist, something that the big stars always tend to do with aplomb. Gaga has done it, with Madonna doing it before her, and this was Britneys' take on it.

The problem is though, other than those two tracks (which have been released as singles), and the other standout track I Wanna Go, the rest of the 16 tracks here (which equates to a lengthy album anway!) are just not that memorable, and cant keep up with those three tracks. The singles have set the mark so high, that the rest of the album just fails to live up to it, and it comes across as a little dull in the end, when it could have been so much more.

I think she has made the right choice in changing up her style with this record, as she attempts to stay relevant in the rapidly changing scene, but the rest of the album needed to live up to the heady heights already set.

It has already gone straight in at the top spot in the States (the sixth album of hers out of 7 to debut at the peak of the Billboard 200), but that doesn’t take anything away from the fact it is bit boring, and by the book. It needed more anthemic pulsating club banger hits, and although “Big Fat Bass” with Will.I.Am sounds like it should be mega, it isn’t anything special, and that is what the entire album sounds like. The songs sound as though they have been produced en masse, and are by the book, devoid of anything memorable or catchy.

An average album from a superstar. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, but there is nothing inherently brilliant about it neither.

5/10