Britney Spears - The Singles Collection The Chronicle

By Brian Contratto
November 12, 2009

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Britney Spears conceived fall from naivete seems awfully imaginative. Even her 1st unattached in 1999, ...Baby One More Time, presented the merely legal star in a fetishized school-girl phantom. In 2009, she might be even more gratuitouscheck If U Seek Amybut the decade-long yarn has consistently been sex. Her newest offering, The Singles Collection, offers a fairly forcing retrospective of Americas favorite transgressive pop star.

By 2001, she dripped the final appoint for self-titled Britney, her weakest album. The log was still premonitory because its inclusion of Im a Slave 4 U,CSI NY Season 7, produced by megastars the Neptunes. This production crew would come to depart their mark on one insane digit of chart-toppers, and the choice marked the 2000s zeitgeist of super-produced, hip-hop-inspired pop singles. 2003s Toxic is the zenith of this trend. Her singing is inconsequential; prefer, her role namely attempting sex appeal and star power to sell vocoded vocals,Harry's Law, detuned synth explosions and that infectious fiddle example.

The Singles Collection succeeds in sticking to what she does bestblessed few of her soul ballads are included. The exception is Everytime, the remove champion of this team. She doesnt overextend her vocal competence here and sounds less cloying than usual, probably because her anguished distribution actually feels reliable (the song was written presently after her breakup with Justin Timberlake).

Somehow, Britney managed to identify back-to-back post-traumatic stress releases: Blackout in 2007 and Circus in 2008. The 6 songs embodied from these albums hold their own opposition older work, propelled at club-ready making and more sex. Piece of Me even succeeds in straying from the lechery, instead taking jabs at the paparazzi, a topic she may well be the globe administration on.

The sole current inclusion is 3, a song that sells the moralities of threesomes in a 1-2-3 choir. Its already topped the designs. Britneys comeback, expertly orchestrated by pop gurus like Max Martin, has verified this new compilation, and The Singles Collection is certainly more required than 2004s My Prerogative. In truth, it might be the merely Britney Spears album you ever absence.