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This is going to be a very unusual review of “Blackout”. I’m not going to feign surprise that someone with Britney’s reported problems could deliver a great album. Many great names in classical music and jazz over the past 50 or more years had entropic personal lives or addictions of one sort or another.
I’m not going to complain about the sexual obsessions of the lyrics. This is dance music - the lyrics are supposed to be about sex. I don’t think songs about gardening, cookery or politics would be entirely suitable for communal dancefloor chanting.
I’m not going to credit Teresa LaBarbera Whites, who is Britney’s new A&R manager at Jive, with unusual resourcefulness in propping Britney up in a recording booth long enough to get a few notes out of her. All of Britney’s producers associated with this project have commented favorably on her professionalism and work ethic.
And I’m definitely not going to join the merry carping throng who claim that Britney’s vocals on the album are so “processed” and “layered” that they might as well have been sung by a machine. This is the sort of rubbish trotted out by people who have made up their minds about the album - maybe even written reviews - without actually listening to it.
Anyone with a decent set of headphones will soon learn that electronic sounds may have been superimposed on Britney’s voice on one or two tracks, but her vocal lines themselves come straight from her and not through a Vocoder
I’ve long since passed the point of being impressed by loud voiced, “listen to meee” bellowing and meretricious arpeggiating. If it has a reference point in other genres of music it’s those reviled guys in jazz who spent all their time running up and down the scales but “blew nothin’” - to use the contemporary phrase for hot-aired vacuity.
What I want to hear is an interesting voice. It doesn’t have to be soaked in booze and breakdown so long as it’s delicately nuanced, with grace, style, humor, variety and an ability to create magic, felicitous moments that live on in the mind every time you think of a song. Britney’s voice is all of that, and on this album we hear her making further developments to her stylings.
On previous albums it sometimes seemed that she took a fairly functional approach to the faster songs, saving her unique vocal signature, along with most of her subtlety and variety, for her ballads. On “Blackout” we see her display a whole range of interpretative approaches to dance songs, and it isn’t too difficult for the observant to understand why Teresa LaBarbera Whites remarked that it was Britney’s magic that turned these songs into what they are.
Gimme More
The verse has an incredibly catchy and unusual melody, while the chorus has the simplistic chant-along potential that makes enduring dancefloor favorites. There’s a little electronic “clouding” of Britney’s vocal at the start, but after that everything’s perfectly natural. Her performance here is something of a technical tour de force. Listen to the way she handles the line “center of attention, even when they’re up against the wall” - she goes from angelic to earthy in the span of one phrase and her perfect little vibrato at the end of “attention” is something to treasure.
“Piece of Me”
This is an “attitude” song, like “My Prerogative”, and the melody line sounds like it was inspired by Cameo’s “Word Up”. The production is quite compelling and intricate - there’s something special about the way the chorus seems to take on a kind of new forward impulsion, and the treatment of Britney’s vocals is very curious. If you listen carefully over good headphones you discover they aren’t Vocodered at all. In fact, the vocal lines are shared between a stereo “pair” of Britneys at left and right, whose vocals aren’t processed at all, and a central solo Britney whose phrases start off naturally but are overlaid by a kind of electronic fuzz towards their ends. Britney sings the song in a flat, robotic style as if to satirize the media’s constant negligence of the fact that she is actually a human being.
“Radar”
If ever there was an instant radio-friendly smash hit, it’s this song. Fans seem a little ambivalent about it, and admittedly it may seem a little lightweight. But it’s insanely catchy, even on a first hearing, and has a very hummable melody. Here again, Britney’s vocals are shared between a stereo pair singing the higher-pitched phrases in unison at left and right - who do most of the work - and a deeper, more subdued central solo line which shares its space with an electronic buzz that sounds like an old guitar fuzzbox. Despite initial impressions, none of the vocals are in any way synthesized or electronically altered. Britney’s vocals are simultaneously innocent and sly and her usual subtlety is illustrated by the way she introduces slightly differing millisecond-long delays into her repeats of the lines “when you...walk” and “when you.....talk”.
“Break The Ice”
Rumored by some to be the next single, this is a simple song but a very complex vocal production that rewards repeated listening. Following a charming spoken introduction, Britney begins in her familar “croaky” mid-range, then her higher-pitched vocal line enters, seemingly from a higher physical plane, and swoops between the extremes of its register in a dizzying fashion. Next, her sweet choral “sighs” (supplemented by the excellent Keri Hilson) enter as counterpoints to left and right. Then there’s “I like this part” and its weird electronic seagulls. Again, anyone looking for electronic manipulation of Britney’s voice will be left disappointed.
“Heaven on Earth”
Some people have been looking for signs of the claimed Donna Summer influence on the album. Well, here it is. The opening bars are classic Giorgio Moroder and the overall rhythmic approach follows his blueprint pretty closely. In contrast to the previous song, this one is vocally simple but instrumentally complex, with a range of effects rushing it along, including occasional interjections by an almost subsonic bassline. Meanwhile, Britney begins in her “naughty but nice” sweet, teasing voice but at “I’ve waited all my life for you” changes to her most innocent one, with some barely audible confidential whispers in our ears. As she finishes the song with “I’m so in love...” her voice, incredibly, tranports us back in time to the Britney of 1999 and is a deeply touching moment in the light of all she’s been through since.
A wonderful track.
“Get Naked (I got a plan)”
“This sounds nice” whispers Britney at the start, but I guess she’s talking about the groove! Indeed, the beats are so irresistible, this writer found it impossible not to get up and crash dangerously around her workroom... At first it’s hard to love the intoxicated-sounding male vocal contributions, but they’re a central part of the concept of the song and thus, presumably, unavoidable. As he chunters on and on about his “plan” and Britney keeps telling him in her most seductive voice to “take it off” we can only speculate that this drunkenly amorous encounter wasn’t going particularly well! I was extremely dubious about this track on first acquaintance but ended up loving it. It’s what we, around here, call “an absolute hoot”!
“Freakshow”
I really can’t get over the fact that I heard the instrumental demo of “Freakshow” long before I heard the finished version. And it was pretty obvious that there was nothing to it, in the most literal sense. It sounded like someone in a store trying out a cheap keyboard for the first time in their lives. Even Britney struggles to create a silk purse out of this particular sow’s ear, though her voice is strong enough and in a natural acoustic. There’s no melody line, but the beats are pretty good - for sitting in your chair, taking a sip of beer and waiting for something better to come along. Britney does her best to turn it into a sexfest but it’s barely an Ann Summers party and a complete waste of her talents.
“Toy Soldier”
A companion piece to “Freakshow” and not really all that much better. It’s a shame they put both tracks together on the album - unless they were trying to create an interval in the middle where people could go and make coffee or feed the cat. This effort has almost as little melody as “Freakshow”, but it does have a considerably livelier instrumental track, sound effects, a military-style snare drum and a vivid, attitude-filled vocal by the Divine Ms B - she sings with an almost audible curl of the lip throughout!
Hot As Ice
This is one of the most straightforward songs on the album. It’s a cheerful stomper really, but with a strong and memorable melody. It’s a simple production too, with Britney singing the verses solo from the center and the chorus as a stereo pair from left and right. Britney gives it plenty of sharpness, attack, energy and bite and her “break it down” with its down-turned phrasing is almost brattish. Once again, her vocal isn’t processed in any way, but she does share the center channel with a certain amount of fuzzbox at times. I have to laugh when she sings “I feel like heaven, 24/7” - it really does sound like “I feel like Kevin”! Woman, get over it! And the celebrated “f*ckery” sounds more like “suckery” to me. Whatever that is.
Ooh Ooh Baby
There’s not too much to say here, because this track speaks for itself. A lovely, bouncy song with an infectious rhythm and catchy tune, this could be singles material. The production is clear and uncomplicated, there is scarcely any electronic interference, and the backing tracks are made using real instruments! Britney’s vocal is in her mid-range, strong, energetic and urgent. It’s strange that her critics only ever seem to notice it when she uses her breathy, high pitched voice, because on a song like this she sounds confident, sassy and talented.
Perfect Lover
Danja serves up a very contrasting production here. It’s constructed around an achingly lovely melody but the structure is very complex, with loads of vocal lines coming from all directions right from the start. Britney emerges from a forest of “uh-huhs”, purring her sexual come-ons at center as softly, sweetly and coquettishly as only she knows how, but some extra fervency enters as she hands over to the two Britneys who share the unison stereo pairs. Then it’s like a vocal trio as the three Britneys swap lines, with orgasmic moans from Ms B and rather more soothing ones from Keri Hilson.
Why Should I Be Sad?
This is a very Janet-Jackson sounding track, and as such may seem a little out of character with the rest of the album. But it’s nonetheless intriguing and an attractive song in its own right. I wish I could find a reliable version of the lyrics (all the attempts currently on the web are laughable) because it’s probably as close as we’ll ever get to hearing Britney say what really happened between her and Kevin that led to the divorce. There’s no sexual cooing about her vocals this time - sings the song absolutely straight, but sounds heartbreakingly vulnerable. There’s something about this song - maybe Pharrell’s minor chords - that creates a kind of bittersweet atmosphere of nostalgic yearning that drags a few teardrops out of this deeply emo reviewer’s eyes. “Britney, let’s go!” pleads Pharrell, trying to drag her away from the wreckage of her life. Why should she be sad? Is there even time to write it all down?
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I can't believe you don't like Freakshow! It's one of her best in my opinion. The "me and my girls want to get it on" line is truly catchy! The song reminds me of Fergalicious for some reason.