britney spears pretty girls?

Favourites on first listen (on a flight) were If We're Dancing and Clumsy (!!!) I dunno about no stinkers but it's so pleasantly surprising after Britney Jean and Pretty Girls

Oh I also forgot the last song which is sung I think entirely in French??!?! so great

Yeah, that's a great way to end the album. If We're Dancing is one of my favourites. Man On the Moon, Slumber Party, Invitation, Just Like Me and Hard to Forget Ya are all up there too.

If I'm Dancing is the best Britney Spears song I've ever heard in my life.

ah, I just listened to a few songs and was wondering where some of the tracks mentioned here were : they're only on the deluxe version !
the track in french is quite wtf... but it's pretty cool (although I don't understand everything she says... and I'm french !).
first album from her that I care enough to listen to since Circus (which I didn't like much, especially following the great Blackout).

i'm starting to suspect there's an inverse correlation between cover art and album quality: 'britney jean' had her best cover art in years, and the music was terrible; 'glory' has an embarrassingly shoddy and half-assed cover, and the music is great!

Glory's cover is roughly the same as Femme Fatale's, isn't it ?
Funny, I just looked at all the covers and up to In the zone she looks like the young Britney then suddenly from Blackout on, it's grown up Britney (although on Britney Jean she seems younger than on the previous ones).

this album rules
wasn't a fan of britney jean but thought perfume and passenger were p great

really love Man on the Moon

I only started listening to current pop stuff recently after 15 years of ignoring it completely -- after doing a very detailed assessment and comparison of the various artists came to the conclusion Britney is by far the best pop star we have. She is the most consistent, basically, to my criteria. I can't stand to look at her but her voice is so strong, character-wise. She's like a candy-coated cartoon or something (so is Eminem!), a quality that comes through particularly strong when her voice is double-tracked. Her voice absolutely flourishes in different contexts and this is her greatest strength. She's second to none as a singing voice-actor. Her seeming artistic apathy is also a strength, in a curious way. She just does her job, and well!

She has a terrible reputation, and seems to have had traumatic fame experiences or something. I don't really know the details. Anytime I mention that I adore her brand of minor key dance-pop people look at me like I smell bad. There seems to be some kind of group-think conspiracy vis-a-vis whether she can really sing or not, which makes no sense at all to me. It seems to me the lady can sell a song in her sleep, no matter how dumb it is. Maybe you don't like her voice, but to deny the one talent she absolutely has? Weird. Backlash or jealousy, I don't know. It's curious. She is certainly strategically aimed at the lowest common denominator, and highly visible, so I sort of understand it.

I was looking forward to this album and now that it has arrived, I feel pretty spoiled by it. I expected it to be thoroughly irredeemable like the last one (I'm a big fan of the single "Pretty Girls" though) and was pleasantly surprised to find she almost sounds like the kind of artist that has a vision here (though not an ambitious one!) The songs are dumb as ever but also just as catchy and wonderful. About ten excellent hooks are all jumbled up in my mind right this moment, competing for my memory's attention. I don't remember which songs they are from. My favorite is the bonus track with the thrumbed Spanish guitar where part of the chorus involves her rhythmically intoning the nonsense words "seas of Cortez" or something. The french song just sounds like an updated take on a Francoise Hardy chanson, and I'm okay with that. The third song sounds like Stax/Volt -- a Carla Thomas kind of thing is what I am hearing. It is cute. There are two songs where she prominently drops F-bombs, and they are cute/silly, but the cursing is absolutely essential to the songs themselves and it works. Numbers 11 and 12 I like least, but they still have their moments of exceptional excellence.

The album overall is very shrewd. Whoever executive produced it earned his no-doubt huge paycheck, the thing is slick and unified, all the songs seem of a piece even though on close inspection they couldn't be more varied in style. I hear a lot of echoes of other pop stars and songs, but all filtered through the creature that is Britney Spears in 2016 and they completely become her own. I for one am glad the only ballad is the single, I am not big on ballads. The rest of the album is all energy and invention and colors and sugar-rush manic pop. The production is relatively subdued, the percussion in particular is mixed well in relation to her voice, which is single tracked more often then usual this time around. The whole thing is coated in a very strong digital delay/reverb or something and the overall effect of the album is that of an MTV-flavored dream. The album title and artwork are the worst thing about this by far, thankfully!!! I can't even begin to imagine how they arrived at Glory as the title of this just plain fun album of expertly polished and performed and completely, totally, unambitious pop ditties.

great review, partic for someone who hasn't listened to a pop record in a decade and a half!

I pretty much hated her VMA performance and the song she did, which was my first exposure to it.

yeah, exceptionally boring. the whole VMA show was as terrible as I expected

"make me" is my favorite song of the year (despite g-eazy). haven't seen the performance though. that they apparently slip into "me myself and i" is enough to ward me off

I was very into Beyonce's segment and the final Rihanna performance.

xp: yeah the whole thing was basically "G-Eazy featuring Britney Spears lip-synching poorly"

i am kind of enjoying this thus far!

and other lukewarm recommendations based on five tracks in for the first time!

"make me" is my favorite song of the year (despite g-eazy).

I have liked Britney Spears in the past, and have paid relatively little attention to pop music this year, but I literally can't imagine how this can be true.

it's one of the best pop songs of the year imo

very texturally rich chorus

I enjoy the album so far. Funny that they basically took half of the prechorus of daft punk's "get lucky" for the main synth riff of "just luv me"!

I have liked Britney Spears in the past, and have paid relatively little attention to pop music this year, but I literally can't imagine how this can be true.

yeah pop this year has been so bad that i had to resort to liking a britney spears song with a great chorus

lol, some variety of this conversation has already been happening over at "worst music writing"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/britney-spears-glory-review

I have, though, always been a sucker for the effervescence of pure pop music, and on some superficial levels this album is machine tooled perfection, in that every track sounds like a single, with slick grooves, zinging hooks, ear-worm melodies, catchy choruses and some little spike of tension in the Britney-shaped centre that makes you question your own judgement as you find yourself singing along.

this is bad y'all

.....?

the new album. like, we'll always have "toxic," but britney is p cooked i think; the singles here are like close to a current pop sound that would work but not quite there and thus it plays like karaoke almost

just as the most obv example, the fact that g-eazy is still the rapper she goes for - when she's long past the point of specifically /needing/ to appear safe or whatever - is fairly telling. (or maybe she has terrible label management but i doubt it)

idk this album is pretty much britney sounding like she's having fun over a bunch of well produced pop songs

this is prob her most adventurous record vocally

I don't think the g-eazy appearance really says much about the album: everyone agrees it's a misstep (including everyone who likes the album) and it's the only guest appearance. So it's not really indicative of anything about the album as a whole (obv. it says a fair amount of how Britney is positioned and the status of the relationship between rap and pop and etc. in 2016).

Contrast with Ariana Grande's album, where the choice of guest appearances is much more central both to the sound of the relevant songs and to what the album is trying to be or present itself as.

also britney probably had even less say in it than usual

g-eazy and britney share a management company and he's (sigh) this year's biggest white rapper. it's an unsurprising hedge - pop is littered with them especially recently.

did not know they shared management, that makes more sense. it's definitely unsurprising, and it'd be unreasonable for me to expect like, young thug - for many reasons, i do /not/ want to know what her reaction to young thug would be - my natural reaction to g-eazy in general is just "aw man, GTFOH"

the production is often solid, it just sounds like 2012/13 pop (and sometimes way earlier - like her trying to recapture the sound from her peak popularity) rather than anything fresh. idk. i think some of the enthusiasm this is engendering stems from 2016 being sort of a thin year for pop.

i'm listening to it again rn and i don't mind "just luv me" and "slumber party" but not much else is registering.

The run of "Clumsy", "Do You Wanna Come Over?", "Slumber Party" through to "Just Like Me" is really strong, I think. My favourite sequence of songs on any 2016 record so far.

Well, I like the album but I'm not sure Britney's relevant in the contemporary pop context. Isn't she completely has-been (since even before Black Out) ? (but what do I know, I have been almost totally disconnected from the current pop world for at least 10y !).
the album is like a lovely pop bubble.
right now, my favourite song is "man on the moon". beautiful chorus.

femme fatale had several big hits on it, plus a number of other strong songs. britney jean was a major misstep and probably the first time she seemed very irrelevant to what's going on in pop. so it's not like she was in a completely unsalvageable situation commercially. idk.

for me the best songs on this album by far are "do you wanna come over?" and "if i'm dancing". "make me..." is okay but contrary to other descriptions of its chorus as 'great' and 'texturally rich' etc. i find it rather basic. the verses are quite nice with the exception of g-eazy's which is execrable.

the pop that's made it to the radio this year is mostly terrible in execution (chainsmokers and their parade of
hiccuping sad girls, all that drake) or intent (meghan trainor) or both (drake again) so I'm ok with Britney just doing her own thing. at least the music sounds fun

otm

is it shitty for me to say that i wish she'd drop the overly worn spangled leotard and the over-the-top ooo boy look at my body nonsense that was on display at the VMAs? It feels dated and beneath her.

its fan service tho

yeah the stage persona is really dated and embarrassing at this point.
it's a bit pathetic to try and compete on that (dubious) aspect with today's 20yo popstars...
she's gonna end like Madonna !

as for the album, the more I listen to "man on the moon" the more I like it : there's not 1, not 2 but 3 killer melody parts !
the first verse melody (intro)
the second verse melody (after the intro)
and the chorus, of course.
(there's another part, a kind of pre-chorus, that is sub par)

and another great thing about that song : there are not two verses sections alike.
the first verse section is : intro melody + second melody + pre-chorus
then after the first chorus it's : first melody + pre-chorus
after second chorus it's : second melody instrumental + second melody + pre-chorus/spoken words

how brilliant is that as a songwriting structure !

and in a perfect pop world, "slumber party" would be a big hit !

and yeah, "make me" is very good (I didn't like it much at first) except that terrible rap section that almost ruins the song.
if I could excise it...
(just like on Selena Gomez "good for you". at least on that one, there's a rap free version !).

it's kinda weird when pop isn't popular, I dunno just to see ppl trotting out these old "Man in a perfect world the Replacements shoulda been HUGE!" arguments any Britney

hum. yeah. maybe not "perfect world" but in a less decadent/mediocre pop world, then !

so obsessed with If I'm Dancing right now https://twitter.com/sadhoeflo/status/768697237283098625

im loving the back half of this album - Better to Coupure Electrique is a pretty great run. Also just chuffed about the atmostpheric rise of Bloodpop.

this seems to be the Glory thread. the 2020 Deluxe version just came out (please don't confuse it with the 2016 Deluxe version!). it has three newnever before released songs, four years after the fact, no one gives a shit**, but I do like "Matches", the song with the Backstreet Boys that forks posted on another Britney thread earlier today - the gallop in the chorus & post-chorus is exquisite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0hb8oYDAcs

**HOWEVER, we do get the ORIGINAL "Slumber Party", which had been scraped off the internet, back. The superfluous Tinashe version has been disposed of. Four years too late, but still.