Popjustice e BuzzFeed liberam críticas do Britney Jean (Nada boas...)

[DIDDY]

We’ve been thinking about Britney’s new album for around a week, which is probably about twice as long as Britney herself spent thinking about it, and here are some disjointed so-called ‘musings’ on ‘Britney Jean’.

The best songs are: ‘Alien’, ‘Passenger’, ‘Perfume’, ‘Tik Tik Boom’, ‘Til It’s Gone’.

The worst songs are: ‘It Should Be Easy’, ‘Chillin’ With You’ and ‘Don’t Cry’.

The song which is neither best or worst, and is therefore pointless, and is therefore arguably worse than the worst ones is: ‘Body Ache’.
And then there is ‘Work Bitch’.

We’ve added up all the star ratings we would have given this album had we illegally downloaded it and put it into iTunes, and it’s a 6/10.

If they wanted to launch this whole ‘era’ with a big EDM banger as the first single they should have gone for ‘Till It’s Gone’ because that seems to be holding up over repeated listens rather than ‘doing a “Work Bitch”’ (ie slumping to a 6-7/10 fairly quickly).

(Although parts of ‘Work Bitch’ are still great.)

When it gets to this point in an artist’s career – really, any point after album three – all you really want (or can reasonably expect) are three songs to add to your Ultimate playlist. Think of all your favourite popstars: there are very few exceptions. Our Ultimate Britney playlist is already longer than most, but following the ‘let’s just have a few additions’ rule we think ‘Britney Jean’ succeeds. The good bits are good.

Some songs, like ‘Tik Tik Boom’, feel like a continuation of Femme Fatale, which in turn makes this album feel like less of an event. We’re not sure if every album any artist ever releases should necessarily be wildly different to the one that came before, but when eras seem to overlap you lose a certain sense of occasion.

‘It Should Be Easy’ should, quite frankly, not be on the album. It is an extremely bad song.

In some ways the instant reaction we (and a surprising number of hardcore Britney fans) have had to this album – namely ‘Couldn’t she have done something else?’ – poses one big question: what should a Britney album sound like in 2013? Well we will give you three options. Firstly, it could have been a straightforward EDM bangerthon. Of the Avicii variety, rather than the will.i.am variety. Secondly, it could all have been more along the lines of ‘Perfume’ and ‘Passenger’: songy songs from start to finish. The third option is a kind of superstylised blogpop type album with all those Dev Hynes / Danja-type people who were supposedly involved early one. One does wonder if the early plan was for this album to be one of those three things, before someone panicked, decided to hedge their bets, ditched the third route and went for a mix of options one and two.
Alternatively, she could have just covered the Tegan & Sara album in its entirety.

Or she could have done something like this. Imagine if Britney had come back with this song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOa3vAQUJSE

Re the above song, you can’t imagine Say Lou Lou getting an A-List radio hit with it, but if Britney had come back with ‘Beloved’ her involvement might have forced it onto radio. And you might say “well ‘Work Bitch’ didn’t exactly force its way onto radio and that actually DID sound like something you’d hear on the radio”, but that is perhaps the problem: it was so close to everything else on the radio, but so clearly inferior, that it was easy to put it to one side. ‘Beloved’ would have been such a shock, and would have been so confusing, that it would have been hard to instantly dismiss. (Also it is obviously brilliant.)

Unfortunately what this album could or should have been has probably been skewed by people going MAKE IT MORE VEGAS.

It’s a shame Britney’s duet with her sister isn’t more of a Moment. Ways it could have been a Moment: 1. A ‘The Boy Is Mine’-style feud song. 2. Actually let’s just stick with a ‘The Boy Is Mine’-style feud song.

If there’s one album this year that could have done with some Max Martin magic, it’s the Jake Bugg one. If there’s a second, it’s ‘Britney Jean’.

People seem to be wondering precisely how personal this album is but some of the lyrics are certainly good good enough to have been written by Britney.

It’s easy to go “oh will.i.am ruined this” but he did ‘Perfume’ and that was great. And he was on ‘Til It’s Gone’ too.

It’s also easy to point the finger at will.i.am for the exclusion of the Dev Hynes, Naughty Boy etc songs but when we spoke to him about it he explained that the decision was not his.

It’s interesting to hear so many different vocal styles across the ten songs. There are even variations on Britney sounding supposedly ‘natural’, which makes you wonder if any of these are in fact natural at all or if they’re all as processed as the more obviously tampered-with will.i.am ones.

Dev, Danja, Naughty Boy and everyone else whose songs didn’t make the final cut should give those songs to Myah Marie, Britney’s longstanding backing vocalist, and she should make The Britney Album That Never Was.

The bonus tracks might be good. ‘Amnesia’ was a bonus track and it was one of the best of the ‘Circus’ era.

Ambitious. That’s a word you wouldn’t quickly fling in the direction of ‘Britney Jean’.

The good thing about this not being Britney’s ‘Ray Of Light’, as had initially been suggested (or did we all just want that to be the case?) is that Britney can still make her ‘Ray Of Light’.

That’ll do.

‘That’ll do’ just about sums up this album, doesn’t it.

http://www.popjustice.com/briefing/thoughts-on-britney-jean-the-new-album-by-singing-sensation-britney-spears/122007/

“Britney Jean” Is A Glimpse At The Pop Star We Used To Know

Britney Spears has never sounded less present on one of her albums, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Britney Spears’ Britney Jean is the pop star’s eighth album, and her fourth since crossing over fully into the realm of the uncanny. Spears has seemed like only a vague presence on her own records ever since Blackout in 2007, with her highly processed voice seeming like a thin gloss of recognizable branding over dance tracks that have often been well ahead of the curve, at least in terms of mainstream pop. She very rarely sounds present in the music, and most of the time, her voice sounds as though it was constructed without her direct involvement, as though she was the musical version of the infamous Tupac hologram at Coachella. It’s a strange tension to feel on a pop record – it’s a little like hearing posthumously produced songs featuring vocals by John Lennon, Ol Dirty Bastard, or Nat King Cole, but Britney Spears is still alive.

When Spears’ previous album Femme Fatale came out in 2011, Willa Paskin, then at Vulture, described the singer’s current status as “zombie fame.” “It’s like she’s a slot machine rigged to spew out radio singles,” she wrote. “The people around her are just pulling on the handle.” Spears lost control of her life in a very literal sense years ago – she’s been under the conservatorship of her father since 2008. She often seems sedated in public, and her life is managed to such an extent that it was vaguely shocking when she came across as lively and fully coherent in her run as a judge on The X Factor in 2012. But even if she seems to be little more together in the recent past, there’s always a lingering question of how much she’s really there. Does she really do anything of her own volition, or has she only gotten better at cooperating? Is there anything about her life that can be considered normal? What is going on in her head?

Britney Jean is a solid pop record that occasionally tries to answer some of those questions while also feeling like the Spears album where she’s the most absent. The dance tracks, produced by A-list stars like Will.I.Am, Diplo, David Guetta, and Swedish House Mafia’s Sebastian Ingrosso, would mostly be just fine as straight-up EDM instrumentals, and she often sounds like a cheerleader on the sidelines of the music. But that’s fine, since Britney Spears records have essentially become a delivery mechanism for bringing EDM conventions into the mainstream. The entire middle section of the album is all thumping club music building up to the excellent “Til It’s Gone,” which basically feels like one long bass drop. The tracks are far more expressive than the lyrics. Britney’s words hint at a new status quo in her life – she’s in looooove! - but it’s hard to detect any particular emotion in her voice. The only time she ever gets emphatic is when she’s imploring, “You gotta work, bitch” on the album’s debut single. Maybe that’s the line on the record that she actually relates to the most. If it’s true that she’s really just a hostage in her own chaotic life, it would make a lot of sense.

It’s not actually a bad thing that Spears seems like a vague presence on her songs now. In a weird sci-fi sort of way, it’s sort of beautiful to imagine that at some point, her consciousness was uploaded to a hard drive, and her songs are made by sampling her digital ghost. She doesn’t sound like a person anymore, but she does sound like the idea of Britney Spears, the iconic pop star. We all know that particular Spears cadence, and when we hear it in her music now, it’s a welcome, familiar presence. It’s like a vague reminder of someone that we used to know, but remember very fondly.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/perpetua/britney-spears-britney-jean-review

[DanisJean]

I Pass

[mr_ambiguous]

:boredney:

[Bruno*]

:4tr5: I CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT, HOLY SHIT! @@guto

[Outrageous]

popjustice ok,

agora buzzfeed não analisou as musicas e sim a vida pessoal da britney

[guto]

já dá pra parar na segunda linha da segunda crítica

Britney Spears has never sounded less present on one of her albums, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

avisem a eles que ser uma popstar e ser presente não é ser uma artista fabricada, é se entregar que nem ela fez ao falar de coisas tão pessoais

[S4mu3L]

:boredney:

[guto]

:4tr5: I CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT, HOLY SHIT! @@guto

je ne parle pas cette langue :london5:

[Joyride]

O que está estragando é isso, 70% das críticas estão avaliando o fato do álbum ser pessoal ou não, e não estão ligando pela qualidade das músicas.

Prevejo ela ficando com uns 50 e alguma coisa no mediatrafic

[Bruno*]

je ne parle pas cette langue :london5:

não obrigue a falar em fracês, tenho preguiça

defasado