Femme Fatale

It's engaging, and, in pulling the best elements from her past two efforts, Spears and her production crew built a purely blissful account of currently-trending tunes.

Despite a slew of hit singles and eye-popping sales figures, Britney Spears has never released an album as coherent from start to finish as her latest, Femme Fatale.

The poppers keep on coming right through the bonus tracks of porn-lite funk-lite that's quirky and clever front to back.

Femme Fatale equips Britney with material which is strong enough to enable the original all-American Pop Princess to hold her own in such an overcrowded context.

As long as Brit keeps the ballads to a minimum and plays to her strength as a willing pop renegade (which she does here more than on any of her previous albums), she will continue to make exciting, groundbreaking modern music.

Even more telling is her frequently blank-eyed delivery: She's never been a great vocal interpreter, but on Fatale she sounds about as present as she did on Blackout.

Femme Fatale is also unevenly paced, overlong (16 tracks in its deluxe version) and burdened with filler like the generic 'I Wanna Go', which tries to find a shortcut to the dancefloor but gets lost en route. But the weaker material is outweighed by the fantastic, from the slamming, techno-tinged 'Trouble For Me' to the glorious bubblegum house of 'Up N' Down'.

While Spears' vocals are inevitably the least impressive element of any given song, she doesn't exactly disappear into the production on Femme Fatale; she settles into it, game for whatever and confident in the hands of trusted professionals who know how to best utilize her.

Good lyrics or no, we still know Femme Fatale will be a blockbuster regardless, which is perhaps why there still remains room for Spears to try a few different things musically, and when Spears' producers are given room to stretch, they manage to pull of a few pop music miracles.

On Femme Fatale, her seventh studio album and plainly one of her best, the erstwhile teen-pop princess is less the center of sonic attention than the occasion and enabler for a dozen of the age's most accomplished record producers to show off their wildest moves from behind a plastic Britney mask.

More than any of her previous releases Femme Fatale is blank. Ms. Spears isn't much more than a celebrity spokeswoman for the work of the producers Max Martin, Dr. Luke and others, who need artists like Ms. Spears as calling cards.

As it turns out, Spears' seventh studio album is part-success and part astounding failure, mixing some of her very best songs with hideous black holes.

Sonically, it has everything except hooks, either in the rhythm or the melody; it's all surface style, driven by sound and given shape by hypersexual lyrics Britney sings listlessly.

Max Martin, Mr "Baby One More Time", has been roped in again along with scores of interchangeable Scandinavians to create an album of autotuned landfill chartpop which you will scour in vain for anything on a par with "Womanizer".

Despite her weak voice and empty lyrics, the troubled Disney graduate has placed herself at the avant-garde of pop with this masterful mixture of über-cool dubstep and sugary pop.

Less adventurous is her sex-on-the-dance-floor lyrical fixation, so it's those playful touches that set Femme Fatale apart from most cornball dance pop on the radio these days.

Gaga's music, let's be frank, is not that much better than, or even different to, that on Femme Fatale, but she knows the lingering appeal of playing dress-up.

Over a clipped backdrop that at times sounds like white-noise static, bell-like notes accent an airy, almost vaporous vocal. The voice belongs to Spears, but it could be anyone's – an anonymous ghost in the dance machine.

At its best, it sounds like a party, with a cutting-edge pop soundtrack. The question of precisely what Britney Spears brings to said party remains as imponderable as ever.

Judging by these songs, she's a childless man-eater who could drink Ke$ha under the table. That disconnect, added to the fact that Spears doesn't claim so much as a co-writing credit on a single track, can make the album feel like an autopilot affair.

Ignore the lyrics, Spears sounds even more like a programmed Britbot than on 2007's Blackout.

Femme Fatale, after all, is a flawed album, with lyrics that barely clear the level of a Ke$ha and a maturity level to match. But it's a pop album that's supposed to make you dance, and when it comes to that, there's not a star out there that can match Ms. Spears.

Femme Fatale may be Britney's best album; certainly it's her strangest. Conceptually it's straightforward: a party record packed with sex and sadness.