I am not that big of a Britney Spears fan. I don’t have all her albums, and I’ve certainly laughed more than once at her seemingly endless bloopers during the (mega-successful, I must add) Circus tour. But I am a big pop music fan, and I cannot deny that throughout her career, she’s fronted a truly impressive number of top-grade pop singles. I enjoy them immensely and consider them to be bona-fide classics. Now, with 2011’s Femme Fatale, Britney’s fronted another superb album that a pop music fan like I can’t help but fall in love with.

First of all, I will say that I was underwhelmed by “Hold It Against Me” (before I even saw the video), which sees Britney fronting a first single that repeats the no-beats-during-big-hook trick found in “Break the Ice” and “Circus”. What disappointed me even more was that both the beat-cut and the melody sounded similar to Circus’ “Shattered Glass”, which gave me the impression that a first single was retreading territory from a previous album track. Of course, the dubstep breakdown is great, and I’ve actually grown to like the song, even more so after listening to it fit in with the album tracks on Femme Fatale.

“Till the World Ends” is a more straightforward club track and obvious single choice, with a vocalise hook that sticks with one listen and will clearly be shouted in clubs worldwide. I like it okay, but Ke$ha’s influence is so great on the hook that there’s little room for Britney to put her stamp on it.

Out Mag by Britney

Thus, I was delighted to find that the rest of Femme Fatale is much more edgy and strange than the first two singles. It seems like Femme Fatale is Britney’s most processed, filtered, and effected album yet, if that’s possible. Her vocals are constantly manipulated digitally on the album’s tracks, not to correct her pitch, but as a production effect; auto-tuned, robotized, pitched, time-stretched, chopped and screwed, This extends to the instrumental arrangements; the producers seem to have designated keywords like “synthetic”, “contorted”, and “seamy” as signifiers for Femme Fatale. Compared to an album like Kylie’s Aphrodite, not only does Femme Fatale sound more processed and manipulated, it’s meant to sound that way. This rough, aggressive, f**ked-up sound, along with the emphasis on club tracks, explains why Femme Fatale has been unofficially named the successor or sequel to Blackout.

Another defining trait that Femme Fatale shares with Blackout is the presence of chants: short and simple phrases, spoken or sung, that are hammered into the listener’s head via repetition (sometimes seemingly ad nauseam, like in the will.i.am-produced “Big Fat Bass”). However, whereas most of Blackout’s tracks still contained proper choruses with fleshed-out vocal rhythms and melodies, many of Femme Fatale’s tracks skip melodic development altogether and aim straight for instant dancefloor memorization (like the vocalise hook in the aforementioned “Till the World Ends” and the title chant in “(Drop Dead) Beautiful”). Even the infectious “Gasoline”, arguably the track that most resembles a classic pop song on the album, has a simple chant-like melody for its chorus-after-the-chorus.

That’s not to say that Femme Fatale doesn’t sound like previous album Circus, or at least an album that picks up where Circus left off. While that album marked a return to traditional verse-chorus pop songwriting on several tracks, it also has its share of intriguing (“Mannequin”, “Unusual You”) and downright bizarre (“Mmm Papi”) productions. Similarly, Britney’s latest album may have the dancefloor as its foundation, but it branches out into weirder and less-classifiable pastures away from the clubs, a big reason why I love it as much as I do. “How I Roll” is an example; it’s not a dance track, even though its in-your-face contorted intro suggests a bass monster will unfurl when Britney’s vocals come in. It doesn’t have a consistent dance beat, and the bass drum drops out for much of the song. The rest of the production is busy and a bit schizo, throwing in grim piano notes, glitchy digital noise, balloon pops and a Speak & Spell vocal together. It all provides an ominous yet alluring backdrop for sugar-sweet melodies and harmonies that a girly-girl singer like Sally Seltmann would sing. Well, except for the line with the f-bomb. In other words, WTF??

The abundance of sonic and musical seams, of juxtaposed disparate parts, seems to be another Femme Fatale characteristic. “Hold It Against Me” provides an obvious example, with the dubstep breakdown coming out of nowhere. A similar dubstep interrupt happens in “Seal It With a Kiss”. Then there are tracks like “Trouble for Me” and my current personal favourite, “Trip to Your Heart”. The former simply drops a nasty and jarring electro interlude into an otherwise standard-issue dance-pop song. The latter is like a daring Xenomania track, all mismatched verse and chorus and wild hooks. From a blaring, unruly intro, it heads into a robotic verse before lifting off into a chorus that twirls amongst fluffy pink clouds and unicorns leaping through rainbows.

Femme Fatale is aggressively and expertly produced, somewhat batsh*t crazy, relentlessly catchy, and tirelessly danceable. I actually enjoy every song on it so far.