Terrible Music Challenge: The full discography of Britney Spears: Part 2
I've been going through the rest of Britney's discography, so let's jump right in!
Blackout
Immediately better than the previous four albums!
Blackout jumps from catchy dance pop tune to catchy dance pop tune, with both more memorable hooks and more inventive musical arrangements than most of what I found on those previous albums in Britney's discography.
The general style of the album is that of modern, R&B influenced dance pop. As such, it could fit right in with the current crop of pop-diva albums in 2018.
A song like "Break the Ice" shows the style that makes for the meat and potatoes of the album, while a song like "Heaven On Earth", with it's Madonna's Ray of Light, Ace of Base-ish, disco-tinged backing music show how there's some variety too.
The catchy songs keep coming all the way through the album, so it seems like this is a fairly strong one, actually. However, I'm still not quite sold, but I'll talk about my gripes when I sum everything up after going through the rest of her albums, as those are general gripes I have with Britney as an artist.
As a little note; there's a lot of incredibly video gamey sounding synths on this album.
Another small note is how the very last song on the album ("Everybody") sounds incredibly much like it's a leftover from a previous album, since it's got that unmistakable the-year-2000 feel.
Circus
While the album does have a different sound than Blackout, I think it's fair to consider it as a sort of follow up to that style. An attempt to carry on in that
direction to keep riding of the success that album probably had (not bothering to check out sales and such). Why repeat it if no one wanted it?
"Out From Under", the third track on the album, ensures that I'm almost immediately worried about how strong this album will be, since it's a pretty lame ballad and since the previous album was so kind as to not have any ballads at all. Even the pop divas I like tend to sink their own ship whenever they do ballads. Just keep those things away from me, please.
I'd say the track on Circus are a bit more hit and miss than what Blackout had on offer. "If U Seek Amy", for example, has an overly insistent but allright sequence of verses and choruses, but the underlying music sounds cheap as hell and really thin.
Actually, it strikes me that this album generally doesn't sound great. There's a feeling of low-res samples running through all of it and I'm not sure what the idea was, from the side of the producers. Maybe they were going for grit? What they got was a trebly, thin and unpleasant sounding album. I find it increasingly less appealing the more time I spend with the album.
"Unusual You" is a mostly pretty bland, overly auto-tuned half-ballad. "Blur" is also pretty limp - and repetitive to boot. There's some more unimpressive tracks, but overall the album is not bad. Not on that account at least.
I really do feel like the general sound of the musical arrangements on Circus sabotages it's potential. I'd have a hard time finding a blander sounding mainstream pop album - purely from that perspective of musical arrangements, instrumentation, synth choices, production choices, etc.
Basically, Circus is Birtney trying and failing to out do or replicate Blackout. Hopefully the next album tries something different.
Oh, and by the way, "My Baby" is completely awful. Plus there's a confusingly inecessary remake of the song "Radar", which was on the previous album. Why?!
Femme Fatale
Kind of more of an R&B influence in some of these tracks.
Also a sudden influx of various pop clichés of that time, seemingly aimed at making the album soud current - which it would no doubt have at the time.
More whoah oh oh oh's in the choruses and more pulsating club synths and tense build ups, etc. I can't shake the feeling that the album is sort of faceless, honestly.
These songs generally don't resonate with me at all. The backing tracks feel both gimmicky and under developed, placing all focus on Britney's unimpressive singing voice.
There's also some real stinkers here. Check out "How I Roll" for an example.
Around the time, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and more did stronger albums of this sort. Femme Fatale, in hindsight, comes off as a hurried, trend hopping effort that doesn't have much to recommend it over the records it seems to imitate.
Britney Jean
I don't know what to say. Seems marginally better than the previous album, but it also feels sort of bland. It's a bunch of standard template tunes with no real character. I'm also learning a bit more about what I see as being Britney's limitations, but I'll talk about that soon, when I'm done with her last album.
This one is just sort of there. I guess it's ok, but it's like why would you listen Evile when Slayer and Metallica exist, unless you're just desperate to listen to
all thrash under the sun, no matter how bland.
Glory
This album seems a bit more inspired than the previous two. It's hard to say why. Just an all-round more appealing sound to it, some better songwriting and perhaps Britney's voice even seems a bit more matured here.
Can't say I'm blown away, but it's the second best Britney album after Blackout, as far as my opinion is concerned.
What I Learned:
Allright, so that was the entire Britney Spears discography. What surprised me was how much of this was really just very vanilla and lacking in any sort of personality. It's hard for me to really describe Britney's personality and style as an artist. Middle of the road pop sadly seems to get closest to hitting the mark. She's a chameleon, but in a bad way, where she seems to blandly imitate rather than innovate and/or follow trends with flair and personalized style.
What really defines Britney as an artist is her voice, but it's also exactly what keeps me further at arms length. She's a very limited singer and clearly needs every songwriting and production trick in the book to pass as a vocalist. She does her trademark vocal fry a lot, she's got a sort of squished, sweet sounding, somewhat nasal voice and seems comfortable inside a very limited tonal range only. She's also extremely limited in terms of expressiveness. She's got basically one mode, and that's it. She can't sell any of her sexy and seductive tracks and she doesn't have any grasp on how to sell harder edged tunes either. She just trudges along, doing her "thing" as usual, no matter the lyrical context and musical style of the song. Name any big-name pop diva and I'd probably argue that Britney is a weaker singer.
If you just like her voice for some reason, then it will work for you, but I find her thoroughly unimpressive.
Basically, Blackout is the only album I could see myself going back to again... but even that's a stretch, to be honest. I just don't really see what Britney's "selling point" is, basically.
That was it for the Britney experiment.
This one took a while... I don't think I'll take this approach again in the future. Instead of slavishly writing about each album in a discography one by one, it's way more meaningful for the purposes of this series to do an overall reaction to the output of the artist, with zoom-in's on key albums. I'll remind myself of that for future posts about various supposedly terrible artists.