(Blackout Cover That Could’ve Been)

(WHAT?! REALLY?!)

Finally, a good week for Britney Spears? Just as we were getting to think that a lunar eclipse might come sooner, here’s some tentative cause for celebration.

In the space of 24 hours, the woman who yields roughly 82,000 results if you Google her name along with the phrase “troubled singer”, has been granted temporary visitation rights to her children and seen her new single Gimme More leap into the British chart’s top three.

Now, if Britney’s record company is to be believed, a good week just got better. Apparently, “unprecedented popular demand” has prompted SonyBMG to bring the release date of her comeback album Blackout forward by three weeks.

Cynics might point out that, one way or another, they would have been compelled to do so. MP3s of songs from the album have been circulating among fans over the last few weeks. That they have been moved to do so, does at least, serve reminder of the very thing that is perhaps most easily forgotten among her recent roll-call of infamy.

She is first and foremost a pop star. In a life not exactly saturated with joy, she should take a certain amount of pleasure in the fact that Blackout coheres far better than sprawling recent sets by her fellow Mickey Mouse Club alumni Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.

Far from apologising for a roll-call of adversity that takes in custody battles, hit-and-run offences, extreme hairdressing, sudden lingerie loss and umbrella-on-pap savagery – she comes out fighting on the utterly wonderful Piece Of Me.

“I’m Miss bad media karma/Another day another drama/Guess I can’t see no harm in working and being a mama,” she declaims over an adhesively catchy chorus.

Britney may have grown up in front of MTV, perfecting Madonna’s dance routines, but she isn’t the self-determining control-freak that her heroine turned into. Neither, it should be added, does she need to be. Her recent mishaps have only compounded her status as muse of choice to top-notch writer producers such as Swedish hitmakers Bloodshy & Avant, Timbaland protégé Danja and The Neptunes.

On the Pharrell Williams-written Why Should I Be Sad and, indeed, most of what precedes it, Britney is a strangely disembodied presence – her heavily treated voice suspended amid an icy fug of minor chords and brittle synthetic beats.

If truth be told, certain songs wouldn’t have sounded too different if her vocal were totally erased. On Get Naked (I Got A Plan) and Radar her voice is a piece that slots tidily into a finely sculpted piece of burnished future-pop.

But when the whole works so well, it makes no sense to mind. Perfect Lover and Toy Soldier are quite simply two of the most strangely wonderful tunes to emerge on any record this year – exercises in sonic risk-taking that, until this point, have never hitched themselves to a Britney Spears record.

So why now, then? Well, perhaps it was in the spirit of having nothing to lose that someone suggested Britney try her hand at a marching-pace sex-fantasy about a soldier which pitched itself somewhere between Prince’s female alter-ago Camille and the sensation of watching Full Metal Jacket as ten Glade Plug-Ins infuse the air with amyl nitrate. Who knows?

Furthermore, does this stuff work on any profound level? Well, ever since she appeared in 1999 with Hit Me Baby One More Time, Britney has enjoyed a certain status as metatextual plaything of Late Review guests and chin-stroking post-ironics (no mean feat, this – Kylie and Madonna had to ensure years of highbrow snobbery to get to the same point). When it comes down to it though, the answer is no, not really. A gaggle of schoolchildren exchanging ringtones on the top deck of the bus will just as easily tell you why these songs work. They tick almost every box in the checklist of great pop, period.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, Britney Spears learned to be a pop star way before she learned to be an adult. In a sense then, it’s fitting that her facility for great pop moments is the very last facet of her to shut down. (Times)

Key Tracks:
MP3 | Britney Spears – Piece Of Me
MP3 | Britney Spears – Toy Soldier (Did you know K-Fed was a Toy Soldier?)
MP3 | Britney Spears – Radar
MP3 | Britney Spears – Break The Ice
MP3 | Britney Spears – Hot As Ice
MP3 | Britney Spears – Ooh Ooh Baby

PMA: 80%

Blackout Promo. So Jive does read blogs…

UPDATE:
Whether you looking for diamonds, rubies, wholesale handbags or those special wedding rings for your beloved, all can be ordered online. From the therapeutic magnetic bracelet to women’s bras, all sorts of commodities undergo the fashion bug and hence you need binoculars the size of a house to keep a check on all that is happening.

I won’t say anything bad about Britney, I mean she just lost her kids. I left the mean, rude remarks to Leno, Conan, and Letterman. No wait those were lame too:

LENO: Did you see this? Did you read about this? Britney Spears lost custody of her kids to Kevin Federline. True story. Unfortunately for Britney, this means the kids will only be available to drive her around the first and third Saturday of every month.CONAN: Did you hear that Britney Spears today lost a custody battle to ex-husband Keven Federline? Yeah. Apparently, Spears was really upset that the judge wouldn’t accept her first choice for legal guardian: MC Scat Kat.

LETTERMAN: So you know I was clicking on the www, ya know on the internet, there? And I saw a headline that said “Britney Spears Loses Children In Court.” And I thought, well, that’s not so bad. At least it’s safer than where she usually loses them: at the gas station.

Basically only Sarah Silverman should talk shit about Britney. Anyway, BritneyFans.org was kind enough to rip Fashion Queen Jeffree Star (we love you in that way, uh huh!) playing Britney’s “Piece Of Me” while dancing on his webcam. What an amazing way to get new music, right? The rip is extremely low quality and there’s a lot of chit chat going around the background. The song is pretty decent. I will not commit to giving it any sort of rating or attempt to play it more than a couple of times because of the lack of quality. I will however beg the internet gods for a HQ version.

mp3: Britney Spears – Piece Of Me LQ

*50s newscaster voice* In similar news, PopJustice and The Sun review Britney’s new material:

via POPJUSTICE:

Ignore all those terrible Britney Spears songs wafting around the internet because the new Britney album is going to be pretty good.

We know this because we’ve heard an actual song from the album, and we don’t mean ‘Gimme More’.

Here is all we have to you about it.

» It is called ‘State Of Grace’ which, as much as we love her, is not something we would ever credit Britney with knowing very much about. But not to worry.

» We would describe the track as ‘understated’ which, again, is something we would not usually credit Britney with ever being. But by understated we do not mean ‘half-arsed’. We mean ’subtle and amazing’.

» There is a bit of an Eastern influence on the track, although less so than Hilary Duff’s ‘Stranger’, which is as good a reference point for songs that have an Indian influence as we could hope to offer.

» With a bit of rejigging it might have sounded a bit like ‘With Every Heartbeat’. As it stands, it doesn’t sound much like ‘With Every Heartbeat’ at all, but it’s not a million miles away.

» The main hook is simply “love is a state of grace between you and I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I-e-I”. Contrary to what you might have just read it doesn’t sound much like ‘Old MacDonald Had A Farm’.

» It is not quite a ballad but is quite floaty and very nice indeed.

» It sounds a lot like a Britney song despite sounding like no other Britney song ever recorded.

via: The Sun Online:

I’m the first journalist in the world to hear her new album and I can tell you — BRITNEY’s back, bitch!

After firing her manager, publicist and assistant, the singer is effectively pushing this album out on to the world stage on her own.

And after my one-off preview, I can see why she has the confidence to go it alone — it’s hot!

You’ve probably already heard the single, Gimme More — which opens with the explosive line “It’s Britney, bitch”.

The track, which has been kicking around on the net for a while, failed to set the MTV stage alight thanks to her dodgy lip synching and dancing.

But I reckon the rest of the album, as yet un-named, more than justifies the hype.

Britney is at her thumping best, with heavy-duty electro pop blending brilliantly with her distinctive vocals.

The stand-out track is Piece Of Me — a personal rant about how the whole world wants something from her.

It opens with the line: “I’m Mrs American Dream, since 17, they want a piece of me.”
*

The chorus really hits home with a message about the crazy publicity circus surrounding the fallen pop princess.

She sings: “I’m successful, rich and famous, I’m Mrs Oh My God I’m Britney Shameless,

“I’m Mrs Extra, Extra, This Just In, I’m Mrs She’s Too Big, She’s Too Thin.”

It is punctuated throughout with the line “You want a piece of me” — summing up how she feels about the state of her life.This is Britney hitting back at her critics — the media, the music industry, her estranged parents and the fans who turned on her.

But there is also a love song — albeit with a beat-crunching dance vibe — called Heaven On Earth, which sounds like it is about her ex-hubby KEVIN FEDERLINE. It’s clear from the lyrics that she still loves him.

She sings: “There’s nothing I can do, I’m really crazy about you, when you’re next to me it’s just like Heaven on Earth.”

It continues: “I’d move across the world for you, just tell me when, where, I’ll come to you.”

Other stand-out tracks include Break The Ice and Radar.

They were produced by the likes of BLOODSHY & AVANT and TIMBALAND-protege DANJA, so as you’d expect, all the songs are edgy, with gut-busting beats.

Due to Brit’s chaotic lifestyle the album doesn’t have a name, the artwork isn’t finished and no one at her record label, Jive, is sure whether she will do anything to promote it.

Gimme More is out on November 5, but the release date for the album — November 12 — could change.

All the same, I reckon Britney can’t fail to convince the world she’s back, bitch. Got it!

Can you dig it?