Britney Spears – Circus (2008) Review and Rating

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Britney Spears – Circus (2008)

Posted on 03 January 2009 by nachtebuch

ReviewColumn's rating :
4 stars

Britney Spears - Circus (2008) review and rating Comeback or no comeback, Circus (2008) is to date one of Britney Spears’ most significant albums. It is the first album to be released by a Britney that has more or less settled down from the chaotic mess that her life has been since the infamous incident with a particular shaver and her hair. In all honesty, however, it is a commendable effort of an album; in many of the tracks – even the virtually omnipresent Womanizer – Britney’s voice has regained its existence independent of vocoders or synths. That is not to say that the album is free from them – indeed, many of the tracks continue to feature her vocals layered multiple times over underlying synth or duplicated voices. Still, it is a relief to hear Britney singing again, with some toning down of the electronica-style crafting that went into the production of the songs on Blackout.

I will point out, however, that in all honesty, her vocals on some of the tracks sound strangely unlike her. In comparison with In The Zone, her vocals on this album sometimes sound far too clean to be true. This issue becomes especially obvious in the two ballads on the album, Out from Under and My Baby. They are not downright terrible (Out of Under is in fact not too bad), but her vocals do seem rather unusual at times. They seem to have lost a bit of the darker, sultrier yet somewhat vulnerable sexiness that permeates many of the songs on In The Zone – for instance, Everytime or Toxic. But that in no way makes Circus a bad album; it simply means that we’re probably seeing Britney take an entirely different musical direction, and the defining dance and retro-ish sounds of this album seem to point to that.

The best songs on this album are the more upbeat dance tracks such as Womanizer and Kill the Lights. Worth a special mention is Mannequin, which was the song heard in the dance rehearsal video that was leaked onto YouTube before the album’s release. The best thing about this song is the beat and the fact that Britney’s voice takes digital manipulation so well – something about her voice quality distinguishes itself whenever it is given centre-stage, and the drier, cleaner percussion background in Mannequin certainly makes her voice stand out. The bridge and the chorus are especially catchy (“I don’t care / I don’t care / I don’t care …”) and the fact that they are sung in Britney’s distinctly breathy head voice (think Toxic again) makes you want to listen to it even more.

Circus (the title track) is also worth a mention. The production is darker and more sombre than most of the other songs on the album, but retains an essentially dance sound that prevents the song from sounding out-of-place. It also contains a section that consists of nothing but the background synths, the beat, and Britney’s spoken taunts (e.g. “Let me see what you can do”) that one knows will be the part in concerts during which Britney shows off her moves. Parts like these, of course, also remind one of other songs from her pre-crisis albums, e.g. Boys from the self-titled album Britney. Essentially, the song Circus, and indeed the whole album, is like a sonic encapsulation of the darkest times that Britney has ever experienced as a public figure and of the efforts by Britney to reassert her position not just as pop princess (or queen of pop), but also as an individual amidst her conservatorship and frequently unreasonable attacks by the paparazzi.

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