I have to agree. Vocally, Britney seems to be on a roll at the moment and her work on "3" is probably the best she's ever done, swooping from dazzling high notes to her signature biting mid-range and sounding clear, powerful, confident, charming and persuasive throughout. On this showing, she has to be the best singer of pure pop around at the moment.

Pure pop is an underrated genre because it isn't as easy to do well as people think. Most singers who don't "do" powerful, emotive belting (I love Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke by the way!) are simply anonymous. They depend entirely on their material to deliver something of worth but add very little to it themselves. Even the sainted Madonna and Kylie Minogue can't take a bad song and make it sound good. To be brutally honest, all they do is "carry a tune".

Britney has always been different. She adds something of her own unique musical personality to every song she performs, and the SYNERGY of singer and song adds up to a special, indefinable creative magic. On respectable music websites like the UK's PopJustice there's huge anticipation of every Britney single, no matter who has written or produced it, simply because of this magic that she creates. As countless talent shows have proven, singing Britney songs does NOT automatically make you sound good. Most of them are fairly ordinary songs but SHE makes them sound better and more interesting than they really are.

As I've said many times before, though, it's a struggle to persuade people to give her the credit she deserves for simply having a great pop voice and a great creative sensibility. The typical kind of comment she receives is like the following somewhat baffling statement from a current blog review of "3": "Vocally Spears comes across quite similar to “Mannequin” from her Circus album, with her voice being fed through autotune to the point where she sounds like a singing fembot crossed with a blow up a doll. What Britney does brilliantly though (and has done her whole career) is her ability to add her unique personality to the song." (Sorry, ProphetBlog! I know you're a fan of Britneyology! No offense intended!)

Doesn't that seem like a contradiction in terms to you? Her voice is synthesized, vocoderized, autotuned and generally messed around with, to the point where she sounds like a "fembot crossed with a blow up doll", yet she can still "add her unique personality to a song"? How on Earth could she do that when it's being alleged that everything she has put IN during the vocal recording is being taken OUT post-production?

Obviously it makes no sense. Yet, for some reason, even people who should know better suffer from a kind of malign memetic influence when their thoughts turn to Britney. "Oh, Britney Spears! Synthesized vocals! Autotune!!!" Yes, she can sound robotic. But it is actually HER that sounds robotic. It's one of her styles, chosen to suit certain songs. It's a shame people who talk like this can't just open their ears, forget their preconceptions and LISTEN. She's creating BRILLIANCE here, and a lot of it is just passing them by.

Can I say something about Autotune here? It's not the same as synthesizing or vocoderizing. It's simply a device studio engineers use to correct tiny deviations from proper pitch. In the old, OLD days, they just had to let it go - or if it was a clearly audible blooper, splice bits of various "good" takes together till they had a good master. If Autotune is used responsibly, you won't be aware of it. If the singer's totally out of tune and the engineer uses Autotune to bring him or her back in line, you may hear a digital artefact, but few engineers would be satisfied with doing that. Certainly not the ones Britney uses.

Anyway!!! I can't sign off without some mention of the lyrics to "3". I have no moral objections to threesomes or indeed, any form of group sex. If I objected to this element of the lyrics, I'd be a hypocrite and that's all I'm saying about THAT. What makes me a little uneasy (well, very uneasy actually) is the mention of Peter, Paul and Mary. I have a feeling that Conservative America is going to come down on Britney like a ton of bricks because of this.

How can it be explained away? If it was about St Peter, St Paul and the Virgin Mary it would offend Christians all over the world, and rightly so. But many (including the ever-overconfident Wikipedia) have said it's about the ancient and venerable politico-folk group composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and the late Mary Travers. But they were famous for being worthy interpreters and popularizers of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, not for having threesomes. Or is there something I should know?

I'm really, REALLY hoping Max Martin plucked these three names out of the air because they scanned nicely and sounded good, not because they referenced anything or anybody. Like when China Crisis made their track "Black Man Ray" only to discover to their evident amazement that there actually was somebody reasonably well-known called Man Ray and everyone was wondering why they thought he was black!

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