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Celeb News: Britney Jean: 50 @ Metacritic
Member Since: 3/30/2009
Posts: 79,408
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Britney Jean: 50 @ Metacritic
Metascore
53 out of 100
Mixed or average reviews based on 13 Critics
83 Entertainment Weekly
Even now, just about to celebrate her 32nd birthday, Britney Spears remains as enigmatic as the Disney-groomed, emotionally insulated teen who greeted us in the late '90s. It's part of why we treasure her: The feeling that, even as she sings her most seductive or inventive songs, the real Brit's off dreaming her unknowable dreams. Britney Jean takes its title from her family nickname and has been billed as the most ''personal'' of her eight albums. In just 10 tidy songs, it brings us closer than ever before to that distant dreamer.
76 Billboard
Spears' eighth album is a transitional record, just like her third album. But whereas 2001's "Britney" found Spears -- no longer a girl, but not yet a woman -- feeling her way toward adulthood and the candid sexuality of club life, "Britney Jean," her first album released in her thirties, is a subtle shift away from frantic bangers and into more forthright songwriting.
70 Rolling Stone
Britney Jean adds up the high price of stardom. It's a concept album about the loneliness of pop life – with a high-profile broken engagement behind her, Brit gets personal and drops her most bummed-out music ever.
60 NOW Magazine
Lay off the Auto-Tune. Britney’s warbly, trembling whine/wail might not be for everyone, but she used to actually sing, no? And those who loved it, loved it a lot.
60 The Telegraph
This album continues the striptease of Britney’s career. But behind each discarded veil there is just another veil, an insubstantial gauze masking teams of (presumably unphotogenic) producers, writers, stylists and sloganeers. Britney is their glitterball, endlessly spinning in a hall of mirrors. Her only function is to keep spinning, but it only works if the audience is dazzled enough to spin with her.
50 All Music Guide
As the record progresses, Britney sounds increasingly listless, fading into the synthesizers and bass, and only William Orbit knows what to do with that sad, existential loneliness, placing it firmly in the center on "Alien." As the album opener, it's hard to ignore but it inadvertently sets the tone for the rest of Britney Jean: she's not one of us and doesn't feel comfortable where she's at, and that uneasiness underpins the rest of this vaguely dispiriting album.
50 Chicago Tribune
The hype about her most "personal" album yet begins with the album title, "Britney Jean" (RCA), which promotes a sense of intimacy that the songs never quite deliver.
50 Slant Magazine
Despite the absence of longtime producer Max Martin and his associates, the album is a surprisingly retrograde affair, with midtempo tracks marred by dated production and vocals that hark back to the days when Brit was selling 10 million.
40 The New York Times
While “Britney Jean” doesn’t make good on its “personal” promise, that’s not its main failing. The bigger letdown is that the music has lost its snap
40 The Independent
If Britney Spears’ eighth album is what happens when the real Spears stands up, she might as well sit back down.
40 The Observer
"I'm gonna mark my territory," sings the once-imperious Spears on Perfume, the most recent cut from album number eight. Trouble is, there isn't anything on Britney Jean that wipes the floor with Katy Perry, Lady Gaga or Miley Cyrus, the pretenders now remodelling the pop firmament neglected by Spears.
40 The Guardian
It Should Be Easy is one of a handful of anonymous, emotion-sapping EDM stompers, bookended by songs that could have formed the backbone of a much better album. New single Perfume is a delicate, enjoyably unhinged ballad ("I'm gonna mark my territory" she sings alarmingly in the chorus) co-written by Sia; William Orbit's Alien lives up to the soul-baring hype; the Diplo-produced Passenger sounds refreshingly experimental. The closing fragility of Don't Cry – her best vocal since Everytime – frustratingly only hints at what could have been.
30 Boston Globe
With 20 or so producers elbowing each other for focus on 10 tracks (two songs have six listed producers each), it’s no wonder there’s barely room for the singer in the swirl of swerving Ibiza keyboards (“It Should Be Easy”), dubstep bumpers (“Til It’s Gone”) and Selena Gomez castoffs (“Alien”). Her choruses to “Body Ache” and “Work Bitch,” meanwhile, sound like holding-pattern preludes to the club riffs that follow, rather than vice versa, leaving the impression that she’s merely guesting on her own material. And when Spears brings the tempo down on “Perfume,” she sounds like Gwen Stefani singing Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors.” Nowhere does “Britney Jean” sound like Britney Spears.
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Member Since: 12/7/2010
Posts: 26,813
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Alien, Perfume and Passenger are great. The rest is just meh 
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Member Since: 6/15/2012
Posts: 33,138
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Quote:
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There was probably nothing that Britney Spears could have done to embarrass herself at this point.
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Queen of dignity and integrity. 
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Member Since: 8/31/2013
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Banned
Member Since: 5/15/2010
Posts: 15,858
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Lemme change the title to get dem hits. 
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Member Since: 7/21/2007
Posts: 17,522
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their trinity is on point 
Alien, Passenger, Body Ache Til Its Gone
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Member Since: 3/10/2012
Posts: 3,182
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still slaying after 15 years!
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Member Since: 8/1/2012
Posts: 9,673
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Their Trinity is off:
Passenger Alien Tik Tik Boomsus
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Member Since: 3/15/2013
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Member Since: 8/17/2013
Posts: 1,236
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60/100 is good - as good as any other big-name diva got this year. And justifiably so. I'm glad there was no old-ass-hipster criticism of the unapologetic and (by pop standards) hardcore electronic sound of one or two of the songs.
The only thing I disapprove is the album cover art (not fond of the random 1980s mix of black and white with neon)
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
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Member Since: 12/13/2011
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Even in adulthood, Spears’s voice remains that of a pouty child, though it is often hard to detect any human personality beneath the layers of Auto-Tune. The lyrics are banal to the point of indifference, and with the tracks sequenced (as mainstream pop collections usually are) to put big hitters first, there is a sense of declining returns as events progress.
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kii
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Member Since: 3/7/2011
Posts: 19,696
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Hmm, this will probably not get a good grade from metacritic
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Banned
Member Since: 5/15/2010
Posts: 15,858
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The telegraph review read like a summary of Britney's life rather than an album review. 
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Member Since: 6/15/2010
Posts: 14,318
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58-63 iPREDICT
She's gonna get dragged hard  .
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 32,982
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Why does USA Today want people to download "Body Ache?" As if I needed more proof that reviewers are out of touch with quality 
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Member Since: 6/5/2009
Posts: 13,743
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Quote:
Originally posted by Eternium
Why does USA Today want people to download "Body Ache?" As if I needed more proof that reviewers are out of touch with quality |
They didn't lie
Although "Chillin' With You" and "Don't Cry" are better, "Body Ache" is the 5th best song on Britney Jesus
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Banned
Member Since: 2/6/2012
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
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Quote:
Originally posted by Alexey
still slaying after 15 years!
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Member Since: 1/7/2012
Posts: 5,043
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Telegraph rated it suprisingly high for amount of dragging in their review 
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