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)
