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The Official Britney Spears Thread; New album "Glory" in 2016
Topic Started: Dec 31 2007, 11:08 PM (68,287 Views)
Riverwide
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henZ
Nov 27 2008, 08:52 PM
THIS is how you fucking DO IT.
Fantastic performance! I love how she can still sound vocally strong even when dancing. She's one helluva performer!

That Britney performance of Womanizer was feeble.
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God Riv, sometimes you just swoop in at *just* the right time!!! I love you!

Beyoncé WILL fucking be remembered, she is one of our only true remaining superstars.
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henZ
Nov 28 2008, 10:51 AM
God Riv, sometimes you just swoop in at *just* the right time!!! I love you!

Beyoncé WILL fucking be remembered, she is one of our only true remaining superstars.
She is sooooooooo talented it's scary. There's no other pop star around today who can sing and dance like that. She's just the very, very best at that. Frustratingly though, she's often let down by good-but not-great material.

Still, she is *ELECTRIFYING* to watch.
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Mats
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IN THE CENTRE OF A RING JUST LIKE A CIRCUS
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I love her weave in that performance, it is ALL OVER THE PLACE :drama:
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She uses it to such great effect. She's officially a genius.
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It is, without a doubt, THE best performance of the year, even though she fucks up in it, which in the end doesn't really matter 'cause there's just SO MUCH energy. It's so great to see a performer who obviously loves what she's doing!!
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Ok Beyoncé is the queen of universe Britney is nothing :confused:

Anyway, here's Britney's promo for her upcoming Star Academy performance:

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Bambi pics:
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Britney is just not a good performer anymore, that's all we're saying.
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henZ
Nov 28 2008, 11:02 AM
It is, without a doubt, THE best performance of the year, even though she fucks up in it, which in the end doesn't really matter 'cause there's just SO MUCH energy. It's so great to see a performer who obviously loves what she's doing!!
Oh does she fuck up? Which bit?
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She fucks up the dance routine at around 1:34 - she nearly walks in to one of the dancer 'cause she forgot to take the two last steps back instead of forward...
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Oh yes! I noticed that! Very slight and she recovered well.
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engin
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She seems out of it.
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engin
Nov 28 2008, 11:56 AM
She seems out of it.
I assume you're referring to the Britney performance?
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The Times gives Circus 3 out of 5:

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? (SONY, TS £12.99)

Pete Paphides
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Funkster
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does anyone know why Radar's been tacked onto this new album??
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2 out of 5 from The Independent

It's anybody's guess how two such high-profile pop acts as Take That and Britney Spears came to release albums with the same title on the same day – especially as neither bothers to develop the circus theme to any extent, save for Spears's claim to be "the ringleader" in her title track, the latest admission of her pathological desire to be the centre of attention ("all eyes on me in the centre of the ring, just like a circus") that made last year's Blackout such a grisly, charmless car-crash experience.

Circus is almost as charmless, but at least it succeeds better than its predecessor in their intention of portraying the former Mouseketeer as some kind of robotic nymphomaniac doll – groaning and grunting "let's make out" with the chilly distance of a future-sex cyborg unit in "Mmm Papi", before plugging directly into the notion of synthetic, emotionless sex with a faceless pleasure-droid in "Mannequin". It's as if her own life is so beset with emotional turmoil that she can't bear any more intrusive feelings in her personal relations. But there are certain standards to maintain even in the world of diva-sex, and while the slap bass lends an apt Seventies porno-funk flavour to the erotic-floorshow anthem "Lace and Leather", the titular pun of "If You Seek Amy" is crass: the entire song is simply an excuse for Spears to sing "All of the boys and all of the girls want to F-U-C-K me", about as cheap as sensationalist outrage gets.

There are glimmers of a more considered attitude towards relationships, with "Blur" notably depicting the morning-after anxieties of an alcoholic libertine: "Where the hell am I? Who are you? What did we do last night?". But the accidental effect of playing such a pop-tart nympho on so many tracks is that the songs in which she's required actually to express feelings, such as the ghastly devotional ballad "My Baby", simply drown in the tidal wave of ersatz emotion, as if she's faked it for so long that she's lost access to the real thing.

But there are moments of salvation, even if they're incidental things like the echoes of New Order's sombre hedonism in the chord structure of "Unusual You", or the way Spears's rhythmic stutter ("Boy don't try to front, I-I-I-know just-just what you are-I-I") brings a surreal flavour of Scottish country-dancing to the prancing techno single "Womanizer". "Radar", an irritatingly catchy electropop groove by Bloodshy & Avant, will doubtless follow "Womanizer" and the title track into the charts, though they do Spears's reputation as a singer no favours. The only track that does is "Amnesia", an ill-judged attempt to route the dramatic, epic-pop style of Lieber & Stoller, Spector and Springsteen through the big-beat rave era, on which her vocals are the lone saving grace.

Download this: 'Womanizer', 'Lace and Leather', 'Amnesia'
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funkster
Nov 28 2008, 12:22 PM
does anyone know why Radar's been tacked onto this new album??
It's a total mystery. I don't see why they'd do it unless they actually plan on releasing it...
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Nov 28 2008, 12:22 PM
funkster
Nov 28 2008, 12:22 PM
does anyone know why Radar's been tacked onto this new album??
It's a total mystery. I don't see why they'd do it unless they actually plan on releasing it...
it was already given a limited promo release this year.... baffling. It's not even a good song (although far better than half of Circus which borders on shite, except for Blur and Unusual U).
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3 out of 5 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.

Alexis Petridis
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