From Times Online. They gave it 3 stars.
Say what you like about Britney, she’s no shirker. While her fellow Mickey Mouse club alumni Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera knock out an album every three or four years, hats off to Britney for seeming to increase her work rate during a sequence of events - mental meltdown, disastrous awards-show appearances, lost custody battles, liaisons with dubious Brummie paparazzi - that would have imploded most careers.
In the thick of her public meltdown last year she somehow made time to record Blackout. A disembodied, Auto-Tuned Britney was perfectly suited to the febrile electronic sound world assembled for her by her producer-writers Nate “Danja” Hills and Bloodshy & Avant. At that moment it seemed as if the only people who cared about Britney Spears were those writing her songs.
Trumpeting her swift resurrection, Blackout’s successor is clearly the record designed to win back all the people who felt that there was enough weirdness in Britney’s life without listening to her weird music. It’s not a bad album by any means. For the sweet languor of its chorus, Out From Under glimpses a world in which Stevie Nicks might have been enlisted to help write a few tunes for High School Musical. There’s something pleasingly discombobulating too about the queasy pitch at which the recent single Womanizer unfolds.
On an album on which outright thrills are infrequent, such equivocal pleasures become magnified. It’s understood that Britney wasn’t given a record deal to deliver critic-titillating, metatextual future-pop, seemingly inspired by the hell of being a mentally fragile superstar in Los Angeles. It’s just that she’s really good at it. Co-written by Nate Hills and Marcella Araica - who wrote much of Blackout - Kill the Lights covers similar ground to that album’s Piece of Me, a declaration of war on the paparazzi who provided the world with an hourly account of her breakdown. “Mr Photographer,” she hisses, ire no doubt stoked by her ill-advised affair with the Brummie snapper Adnan Ghalib, “I think I’m ready for my close-up tonight.”
Also bearing Hills and Araica’s hallmarks is the gorgeous Blur, a sleepy collision of beats and warped keyboards that has Britney sounding not all that unhappy about her inability to remember what she did last night. Helping to shade in a rich purple patch in the middle of Circus, Unusual You will find a home with anyone whose love of melancholy Europop is fatal enough to take in Limahl’s Never Ending Story.
Thereafter, it all gets a bit baffling really. Flouting the current convention for front-loading big albums with potential singles, the brilliant closer Amnesia - which sees big digitised Spector beats tied to a killer chorus and Britney multitracked to sound like Gwen Stefani - ends Circus on a high. Without deployment of your skip button though, you’ll need to sit through one previously released song (Radar also appeared on Blackout) and some utter stinkers. The helium come-hithers of Mmm Papi couldn’t be less sexy if Christine Hamilton were singing them, while the drippy Disney dreck of My Baby formalises Britney’s return to pearlescent-white on-message pop.
Is this how it’s going to be from now on? The Mickey Mouse Club days must seem several lifetimes ago. Why on earth would she want to go back there?
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From The Guardian.
The last time Britney Spears released an album, barely 12 months ago, there understandably wasn’t much promotional activity: the singer was too busy yo-yoing in and out of rehab units and psychiatric wards to give interviews. Nevertheless, she was still afforded a Rolling Stone cover feature, meticulously detailing what it called “the most public downfall of any star in history”. Perhaps the most startling of its revelations was that, in the midst of all the mayhem, Spears appeared to be having fun. “She is,” it concluded, “enjoying the chaos she is creating.”
She certainly sounded as if she was enjoying herself - albeit in an eyes-rolling-madly-in-the-sockets way - on Blackout, the album she wasn’t promoting. It smartly dispensed with the ballads that invariably provide the nadir of any pop release and instead fizzed with distorted electronics and screw-you defiance. A relentless, risky album made by a woman whose obituary was apparently being prepared by Associated Press, it proved a tough sell, shifting only 3.1m copies worldwide. To put it into some kind of perspective, that’s 22.9m fewer than her debut album sold.
Understandably, whoever has wrested control of the apparently recovered singer’s affairs has elected to send out the signal that normal service has been resumed with Circus. A tour is planned, interviews have been given and, alas, the ballads are back, bringing with them the inevitable sprinkling of tedium. Listeners with delicate constitutions might feel the urge to fast-forward the minute a dribbly tribute to her kids called My Baby starts, but are advised to stick around for the bit where she inadvertently suggests the fruits of her loins are cursed with oral hygene issues: “I smell your breath, it makes me cry.” You want to try giving them those Listerine strips. Tell them they’re sweets.
Occasionally, you wonder if Circus’s more conservative feel is entirely intentional or the result of a lack of new ideas from the assembled array of hit-factory producers. There are decent tunes here, and hooks that sink into you with ruthless efficiency, not least the chorus of current single Womanizer, but you expect cutting-edge pop to deliver not just hooks and tunes but a degree of sonic daring. The one time that happens is on Mannequin, which amasses a bizarre swarm of electronic noise behind Spears’s voice in lieu of a melody. Elsewhere, there are collisions of blaring rave synthesisers and glam beats, kitsch 80s references on Leather and Lace, knowingly ersatz indie guitars, and the equally knowing application of so much auto-tuning to her voice that Spears resembles a robot with a sinus problem: all ideas that once seemed thrillingly audacious, all now starting to sound over-familiar, like default settings.
Perhaps that’s why Spears, never the most emotive vocalist, frequently sounds disconnected, even a bit bored. If U Seek Amy is a better pun than it is a song, but there’s a relish about her delivery of the chorus - “all the boys and all the girls are begging to F-U-C-K me” - that’s noticeably lacking elsewhere. Kill the Lights attempts to raise the kind of ire found on Blackout, but falls flat. You might think she could inject a bit of pathos into Blur, a tale of hungover regret, but no. “Hope I didn’t but I think I might,” she sings blithely, as if singing about having an inadvisible dollop of chilli sauce on a late-night kebab, rather than say, being photographed staggering around LA at 2am without a skirt on, knickers covered in blood.
Sometimes the desire to suggest that order has been restored in Spears’ world leads to catastrophe. Someone has come up with the demented notion that what she needs to do at this critical juncture in her career is revisit the coquettish Lolita persona of … Baby One More Time, hence Mmm Papi. The results are pretty bilious. That’s partly as a result of the arrangement, which was evidently arrived at only after an arduous, but ultimately successful brainstorming session to devise the most irksome music imaginable.
But the main issue is that there’s something grotesque about any 27-year-old woman who thinks it’s sexually alluring to do a goo-ga-ga baby voice: “You pappy … I mommy … which mean we lovey.” You listeny, which may mean you pukey: it’s the most stomach-churning song about sex since that Jacques Brel number in which he swore on the wet head of his first case of gonhorrea that he could hear the voice of a “queer lieutenant” every time he thought about his first visit to a mobile army whorehouse.
In fairness, it’s a rare lapse into abject awfulness. Circus isn’t bad as pop albums go, but whether by default or design, it’s substantially less edgy and exciting than its predecessor. You’re left to conclude that the sound of Britney back on track is substantially less interesting than the sound of Britney going off the rails.
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From The Sun.
BRITNEY SPEARS - Circus
***1/2
IT is a decade since school-uniformed Britney Spears back-flipped her way to the forefront of popular culture – achieving her first and only number one in the States with Baby One More Time.
The world has since watched in horrified fascination her steady decline from teen queen virgin to a twice-divorced fallen star.
After 2007’s ill-timed and overproduced Blackout, an unconvincing attempt at maintaining her once glossy façade, Britney has finally chosen to embrace the pantomime chaos and release a more honest body of work on new album Circus.
Britney proves that it truly is show time, as she steps into the ring on tip-top form and wears her heart on her sleeve.
She confronts issues of fame, broken relationships and motherhood against a masterfully engineered soundscape, which at times verges on the electronic complexity of a Daft Punk remix.
Having already found global success with the first single — the dark and aggressive pop powerhouse that is Womanizer — and with a guest spot on tomorrow night’s X Factor, it looks like Britney’s new extravaganza will be coming to speakers near you.
Here POPPY COSYNS takes you on a track-by-track taste of the album, which sees the Princess of Pop transformed from media clown to whip-cracking ring mistress:
WOMANIZER: Siren synths trigger the start of what is already a dance floor favourite from Louisiana to Lewisham. Savvy lyrics and an obnoxiously repetitive chorus guarantee pop perfection.
CIRCUS: “All eyes on me in the centre of the ring just like a circus/When I crack that whip everybody gonna trip just like a circus,” sings Brit, reaffirming her bad-girl image on the album’s infectious second single.
OUT FROM UNDER: A starker vocal and acoustic guitar backing herald the first of the few slower tracks. This is a sincere story of a suffocating relationship.
KILL THE LIGHTS: A full-on bolshy tirade, attacking sleazy parasitic paps with a vocal performance reminiscent of leotard-era Madonna.
SHATTERED GLASS: Creepy electro beats pulsate through this warped tale of an irreparable partnership and it becomes positively robotic as it reaches its crescendo.
IF U SEEK AMY: “Oh baby baby,” starts this track recalling a certain sound byte in our audio archives and the “ha ha hee hee” chorus is appropriate to the album’s carnivalesque overtone.
UNUSUAL YOU: The backing track on this tune leaves it sounding like the discovered dregs of a would-be late Nineties hit.
BLUR: An anthem for all those who have misbehaved under the influence: “Can’t remember what I did last night/I gotta get my head right, where the hell am I? Who are you? What’d we do last night?” showing Britney at her brutally honest best.
MMM PAPI: Mashing up whimsical sound effects with girlish vocals and bizarre lyrics which reference her love/hate father-daughter turmoil.
MANNEQUIN: Another Queen Madge moment, this slickly produced feisty pop number is one of three tracks co-penned by Spears herself.
LACE AND LEATHER: Something of a return to Lucky era Britney, only this time with racier lyrics and moments of electro pizazz – in particular the guitar which cuts in halfway through.
MY BABY: The most pared-down track on the album, fully exposing Spears’ fragile vocal – this is a tooth-numbingly saccharine ode to her babies. Aw.
RADAR: A hearty helping of electronic R&B which sounds like the Pussycat Dolls at their most risqué.
AMNESIA: Almost Eighties-sounding in its synth-led campness, Britney tops off her show with an old school pop formula, marrying chorus, bass line and melody in a perfect trinity of chart-topping potential.
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The following is from USMagazine.com.
Has Britney Spears benefited from things getting less chaotic? Though she’s called her postmeltdown life under father Jamie’s conservatorship merely “existing,” she’s produced a polished follow-up to last year’s Blackout with her sixth studio CD. The amped-up title track has a triumphant Spears declaring, “I call the shots,” and she recalls Prince on the club-pleaser “If U Seek Amy.” But the real shocker is the self-penned ballad “My Baby,” on which Spears evokes — yes — Mariah Carey while singing about her sons with the best vocals of her roller-coaster career. (Jive)
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The following is from EW.
To give everyone an idea of how well “Circus” faired, here is EWs review of “Blackout”. They gave it a B+.
Britney spears is making a habit of putting out albums with ? titles that promise more self-revelation than she’s ultimately able to provide. Last fall, she released Blackout…which turned out not to have anything to do with experiencing blackouts. This year, it’s Circus, with a title track that’s not about the madhouse her life has become but just a brag about her prowess as a whip-cracking sexual ringmaster. In the studio, however, she’s no ? auteur, and with her producer-writers seemingly calling the creative shots, Spears is only as interesting as they are on any particular day.
Initially, that’s not interesting enough. Circus’ first half has hitmakers like Dr. Luke and Max Martin bringing their B game to rote dance tracks like “Shattered Glass” (pronounced glah-ee-ass) and the puerile “If You Seek Amy” (sound it out to hear why it’ll be a middle-school sensation). But halfway through, Circus shifts from defiant booty calls to subtler material; suddenly, it’s a first-rate electro-pop album. The Danja-produced “Blur” is a remarkably pretty song about (finally!) an actual blackout. “Mmm Papi” giddily sets her littlest-girl voice against a gu
The standout is “Unusual You,” a pulsating ballad where a woman of experience finds ? unexpected love: “Didn’t anyone tell you you’re supposed to/Break my heart, I expect you to/ So why haven’t you?” Mostly, Spears still ? presents herself as fantasy object, but here might be her own fantasy — of real acceptance. Next time, Britney, flash us more of that. B
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The player on the sidebar has been updated with the leaked songs. Currently we have Womanizer, Circus, If You Seek Amy, Out From Under, Kill The Lights, and Mannequin in FULL. Enjoy, enjoy.
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Amazon has posted 30 sec clips of the entire Deluxe edition!! Check it out here. I will be updating the site with a playlist of all the clips we have gotten so far. GET READY!!
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