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I’m psyched to introduce a new recurring feature here on Pretty Much Amazing, a little retrospective we’d like to call “Blinded By The Hype”.  In Blinded By The Hype, we’ll take a look back at some of the most highly rated albums we’ve reviewed on this site, after some time has passed, to see if the albums were truly great or whether they were lifted up by buzz.

We’ve all been there – everyone you know is talking about the new album, the single is great, and after a few spins you’re convinced you’re going to love it. You make all of your friends buy it, you listen to it for a week straight, convinced that the album’s an instant classic. A comeback. A brilliant debut. The best album of the year.  A couple months later, it’s collecting dust on your shelf, languishing in the dark recesses of your iTunes.

In today’s music world, music is released at a machine gun pace. It’s a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately type scene, and “lately” usually means this week. Rarely do we stop to smell the roses. Even good albums get overlooked as time passes. And we almost never – aside from year end lists – take a look backward. Hindsight is 20-20, and we’d like to apply that retrovision to set the record straight. Hence, Blinded By The Hype.

To start, since this is the first edition, I’d like to set some ground rules for what is eligible for Blinded By The Hype:

1. 1. Only full albums will be re-examined. Tracks are finicky enough to review the first time, and how a single track fares over the course of a few months is more an issue of personal preference than quality.  Album grades mean more, album spins mean more, therefore we’ll stick to albums.
2. 2. Only albums that received 80+ grades will be re-examined. No point in re-opening old wounds. If it wasn’t good with the hype, it won’t be good without the hype. Sure, there are albums that get better with time. No doubt about that. But hype isn’t involved there – it’s tracks that are growers and lyrics that are layered. Totally different ballgame, we’ll stick to the initially well-received.
3. 3. Only albums that are at least 3 months old will be re-examined. Hype is all about timing. When an album is released, there is an upswell of buzz that races around the blogosphere. Sometimes that buzz cycle extends for a couple months – there’s the leak, the first single, the release, the second single, etc. So we’ll wait until the dust settles before stirring things up again.

I’m making this up as I go along (like most things I do), so I reserve the right to break these rules at will, or add any other pertinent clauses. If you have an idea for how to make this segment better, please share it in the comments – constructive criticism is always well received.

Word. Without further ado, let’s get on with the first edition of Blinded By The Hype. The album? Britney Spears’ Circus.

Stats:

Artist: Britney Spears

Album: Circus

Release Date: November 28, 2008

Original Score: 9/10 (Note, this was before the current 0-100 PMA Rating Scale.)

THEN:

“…this album is going to blow people out of the water. It contains a an unprecedented mix of her old and new sounds, instead of the overproduced Britney we heard on Blackout, and even takes us back to her Baby, One More Time era in terms of production and vocals. Her choice to expand her production selection is what’s really going to make this album different from all the rest. With the right promotion and a well-rounded and produced World Tour, she’s cooking up all the right things for a successful comeback in the face of all who doubted she could ever make it. Ladies and gentlemen: the princess, or excuse me, QUEEN of pop, has returned.”

- Sean, Original Album Review

“Circus will become the album of the year. I never thought I would see the day Britney would be on top of the Music scene again, but it has come. Circus is Britney’s best album and could become one of the biggest pop albums in history!”

- Mark, Comment on Original Album Review

“I love this album! Thank you for giving it such a great review! BEST POP ALBUM OF 2008!”

- Ashlee, Comment on Original Album Review

NOW:

Don’t get me wrong, Circus is definitely not a bad album. It’s better than a lot of pop records that come out these days, and it certainly represents a comeback of sorts for the much maligned Britney. And we can’t really blame ourselves for getting wrapped up in the hype – that’s what people do, especially when a huge artist like Britney Spears releases a new album.

The reality is, though, Circus is a distracted and disjointed album that rides on the success of 5 massive singles. “Womanizer,” “Kill The Lights,” “If U Seek Amy,” “Circus,” and “Radar” are all gigantic tunes, some of which rank up with Brit’s best. A great set of five bumpers that will be enough to keep people spinning Circus in coming years.

The tracks surrounding those hype-worthy songs, spread across a seemingly randomly selected album and bonus disc, are less appealing. Some, like “Shattered Glass” come off as formulaic attempts to mirror previous successes. The beat, from Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco, is catchy enough, but the song is still missing something – emotion, drive, purpose. Instead of a dancefloor hit, it sounds like someone in the studio said “we need a song where Britney yells at a guy who broke up with her,” so they cranked out “Shattered Glass”. It features out of place falsettos from Brit and a few too many effects applied to her voice, and it ends with a shattering glass sound effect. Hmm.

Where “Shattered Glass” is at least formulaically listenable, songs like “Mmm Papi”and “My Baby” are not. In an interview with MTV, Britney said, “”The process was cool, because I got to write a lot of the songs, and in the beginning, I really took part in that.” Ironically, “Mmm Papi” and “My Baby” are the only two tracks on which Britney has writing credits on the album. The songs are gimmicky, uninteresting, and difficult to listen to more than once or twice. I challenge you to find someone who has listened to “My Baby” more than three times in their life. That song is quite literally the worst song I have heard in the last five years.

After letting some of the hype die down on this album, it’s a little easier to see the album for what it is – a pretty good pop album that follows the standard formula of filling space around singles with mediocre tracks. There are definitely a bunch of bangers on Circus, and it has certainly sold a lot of copies, but it’s not the silver bullet comeback album for Britney that everyone said it would be. It’s not her best, nor is one of the best albums of last year. After the dust has settled, I’d give it a 73.

Chris Barth is a columnist here at Pretty Much Amazing. You can read his more succinct daily posts at his music blog, The Stu Reid Experiment.

Tags: Blinded By The Hype, Britney Spears

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 1:25 pm by Chris Barth and is filed under Feature, Music. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.