Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Nov 27, 2013There is plenty of momentum on the first half of the record.... So, it’s a bummer that the last half of the album descends into bland and skippable.
-
Nov 26, 2013This 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.
-
Jan 7, 2014The alien, blank dead-eyedness of Britney Jean is frightening, because it feels like it’s all will.i.am trusts Britney with.
-
Dec 6, 2013Backed up by masters of electronica David Guetta, Diplo and Swedish House Mafia’s Sebastian Ingrosso, they all make sure to drop a storm of ugly, trite and utterly soulless EDM breakdowns and dubstep drops whenever they can.
-
Dec 3, 2013Far too much of Britney Jean defaults to EDM-by-numbers and the numbing lyrical repetitiveness that appears to be Will.i.am’s calling card.
-
Dec 2, 2013As the album opener, [Alien is] 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.
-
Dec 2, 2013An army of producers, including will.i.am, Diplo, Dr. Luke and David Guetta aim to keep Spears centered in the hit parade, but don't take many chances.
-
Nov 26, 2013Despite 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.
-
Dec 10, 2013Play this album from start to finish and it’s hard not to feel that at the core of its cheaply gratifying genealogy is nothing but misery.
-
Dec 4, 2013Nothing on the record comes across as natural, and it’s not until the album’s iTunes bonus tracks--“Brightest Morning Star” and “Now That I Found You” in particular--that Spears sounds like she’s singing for herself. But, on the album proper, neither the pop figurehead nor the real woman behind it can be found.
-
Dec 4, 2013At a mere thirty-six minutes, it’s not a stretch to see Britney Jean as a half-baked effort, more of a commitment to be completed and shipped off than the labor of love it was touted as.
-
Dec 2, 2013Ms. Spears and Will.i.am have turned to European disc jockeys who have found dance music’s lowest, least funky common denominator: the steady thump of four-on-the-floor. And they’ve settled for too many tepid tracks.
-
Dec 2, 2013It’s depressing to find more of the disco-tooled super-producer [will.i.am] same here, allied to faintly atypical ballads that, nonetheless, add little to Spears’s synthetic sex-doll sheen.
-
Dec 2, 2013Much here is busy, effective dance-pop that works, but it fails to rivet like Britney's 00s output.
-
Nov 27, 2013The closing fragility of Don't Cry--her best vocal since Everytime--frustratingly only hints at what could have been.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 560 out of 1079
-
Mixed: 185 out of 1079
-
Negative: 334 out of 1079
-
Dec 3, 2013
-
Dec 3, 2013
-
Dec 3, 2013