During her 10 year career, Britney Spears has sold over 63
million albums. She has had six top five albums in the UK
including most recently Circus which became her fastest selling
album to date. She is one of the top-selling artists of the last
decade worldwide with her albums …Baby One More Time (1999);
Oops!... I Did It Again (2000); Britney (2001); In The Zone
(2003); Blackout (2007) and Circus (2008). In celebration of the
10th anniversary of her debut on the music scene, Britney
releases Britney Spears The Singles Collection.
BBC Review
----------
It might seem rather odd that this new collection features fewer
tracks than 2004’s greatest hits collection, My Prerogative. But
though trimmer, this set represents the best disc yet from
arguably the biggest pop artist of the past decade, packing more
hits (and bigger sales figures) into the equation than any other
festive-period best-of. Put simply, this is the definitive
Britney album.
Because, after all, who needs one of her ‘proper’ albums – sets
featuring the singer’s three or four hits of the campaign in
question padded out with a smorbord of filler material.
They’re out there because the industry model demanded it, though
with release strategies and marketing budgets evolving and
fluctuating respectively, it’d be no surprise if artists of
Spears’ ilk ultimately stopped producing long-players altogether.
If Ash can do it, then…
While her career hit the skids in the middle of the decade – no
need to elaborate on that here – Britney’s comeback with 2007’s
Gimme More and Piece of Me, and the following year’s Womanizer,
was phenomenal. With the singer assumed lost to a life of
perennial befuddlement, expectations for her post-wilderness
material were low. So when Gimme More proved to be every bit as
repeat-play friendly as peak-period hits I’m a Slave 4 U, Boys
and the Grammy winning Toxic, all predictions for what might
follow went out the window.
Seven of these 18 tracks are from Spears’ 2007-‘til-now phase,
and the excitable energy of If U Seek Amy, Circus, Radar and
recent stateside chart-topper 3 comes filtered through admirable
nods to electro artists and production houses of utmost respect.
While her songs might have matured lyrically, often lacking the
comparative innocence of her breakthrough hits and swapping
innuendo for outright smuttiness, compositionally they’re
astonishingly fresh. Even Girls Aloud were too squeaky clean to
do justice to Womanizer when they covered it, such is Spears’
unashamed directness (though Sugababes could probably pull it off
these days).
Spears’ revival in the last two years is evidence that even the
most easily pigeonholed artist can eschew expectation. After all,
when you’re seen as having nothing left to lose, anything with a
little bite is going to leave an impression. And these songs
don’t just make a mark, lingering in the memory – they are
essential pieces of the past ten years of pop history, and
deserve better than dismissal by so-called discerning listeners.
--Mike Diver
Find more music at the BBC ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/syn//albumreviews/-/music/ ) This link
will take you off in a new window