Album Review: Britney Spears - Femme Fatale

I decided about five minutes ago that I am now a musical expert and know all matters regarding the production of music thanks to this morning's 'cultural industries' topic in my 'Media: Popular Culture' lecture. On a more serious (is it ever on this blog?) note, I have decided I will do review/critique/rambles on albums I think are good or bad or... I'll just do whatever I want actually, ignore my attempts at justification. 

So Femme Fatale is Britney Spears' seventh album and funnily enough, the first single off of the album was actually officially released on New Zealand iTunes before anywhere else in the world! I got the song at about 5-10 minutes past midnight, so it's not unlikely I was among the first of her fans to hear it. Pretty cool stuff! Anyway, the single 'Hold It Against Me' was a pretty sweet introduction to the album cause I found it to be a pretty good introduction to the entire album. It has dub-step elements, which seemed to have been a trend-setter in my opinion cause ever since that song came out ALL I have been hearing is dub-step. Not sure if it's just a New Zealand thing or what, but as my friend Brandon would say, "It's just like BWAAAH WAHWAHWAHWAH...". He's right. Still, that's pop music for you - creative, but repetitive.

The dub-step element is recycled onto other tracks on the album, 'Trouble For Me', and possibly others that quite haven't come to my attention. My favourite tracks would be 'Till The World Ends' (the second single, written by Ke$ha! Woot!), 'I Wanna Go' and 'Trouble For Me'. The only track I would say I don't like is 'Big Fat Bass' because it has a horrible rapping bit from The Black Eyed Peas' Will.I.Am, who I find annoying. I'm sick of having black-rappers on white girl tracks too, it's over done and annoying. The fact one is used in Rebecca Black's 'Friday' really just shows that is has become a stereotypical thing to do.

I'm not going to give the album an overall rating, but I will give it a conclusion. If you like dance music and if you listen to music like Ke$ha, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry - you will love this album and it's not to be missed! The (likely) production value is insane, Britney's vocals have been fine-tuned to perfection and, regardless of Will.I.Am's interruption, there are no tracks I think I'll be skipping over for a wee-while yet!