On first listen, Queen Britney's new album is nothing more than a glorious booty call. I'm no prude, but listening to her sensual requests in musical form feels like earwigging on the soundtrack to a sex tape.
In "Invitation", she asks "Put your love all over me". "Slumber Party" has the lyrics "We use our bodies to make our own videos, put on our music it makes us go fucking crazy, oh!". In "Private Show" she purrs "Pull my curtains until they close" and in "Hard To Forget Ya" she quips, “Since I tasted you I got a craving, Shaking in the heat of the night, Oh, yeah, baby you got me misbehaving”. It's 17 tracks of pretty sexy songs (her longest album to date) – the signature bubble gum pop updated to an X-rated version.
I feel like Brit has her tongue firmly in her own cheek It's heavily produced, and many of the tracks like "Make Me…(feat. G-Eazy)" - will be easily mixed into club tunes with a smooth wiggle to “moo-oo-oo-oo-oove” along to. But there are some decent beats in there – the tunes are memorable, the grooves catchy. "Clumsy" has an electro-swing edge with a heavy trance beat; "Do You Wanna Come Over" a twanging guitar and intensely shouty chorus of “Do whatever you want” that has echoes of Gwen Stefani; "What You Need" has a nip of the Pussycat Dolls, with that big band sound and excellently opportune dancing around the kitchen flavour.
Then there's the flicking, percussive Spanish guitar of "Change Your Mind (No Seas Cortes)"; the deep-down boom-boom of "Liar" and "Couture Electrique" is sung all in French, ooh-la-la. I realise, while listening to "If I’m Dancing", that it's a weirdly quirky bop jam, that Britney is singing with a weirdly English accent and, weirdly, I seem to be dancing along. There is some good stuff in here, and I feel like Brit has her tongue firmly in her own cheek, when she finishes off "What You Need" with a sparkling "That was fun!"
Going back to "Private Show" I realise that maybe, this song is OK if Britney Spears has a GSOH. Because the tersely formed and punchy, punctuated “Work it, work it, boy watch me work it, slide down my pole, watch me spin it and twerk it” is actually hilarious and could be a royal pisstake of Chris Brown's song of the same name.
And then I realise that actually, Britney makes music like a lot of men from that kind of genre. Raw, filthy, overtly pervy and giving zero fucks about the consequences kind of music. Good for a groove, great for the cash register. As such, the people that might judge her for just being the ultimate knickerless party girl, even when she's a 34-year-old mother of two, can peace right out.
There's no denying that as a pop star, Britney is the fly who refuses to be swatted. Her eight previous albums have never been quite as floptastic as the world might have wanted them to be, and this one will be no exception.
