When people criticize autotune, it's because the technique smooths vocals over to create faultless, airless productions. From the moment a chorus of voices barge into "Gimme More" the album surrenders its vocal center- Britney is subjected to sudden drop outs, octave falls, pitch-bending, stutters and warps, often afflicting only a word or two at once. If she seems marginalised on Blackout, it's because her voice is being constantly splintered, chopped, and interrupted. Blackout reminds me how instantly recognisable Britney's vocals are, treated or untreated: Her thin Southern huskiness is one of the defining sounds of 00s pop.
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However good the music on the record is, and most critics agree it's pretty good, surely this poor half-there creature can't have had much to do with it? I want to hold off the wider question of Britney's agency for a while but simply as a vocal presence she's all over the album. Britney's disastrous VMAs performance- speaking of dead eyes and jerky shuffles- has set much of the tone for reviews of her new album, Blackout. On one level Palmer's story is a cliché- sour secrets of the suburban everygirl, virginal beauty off the rails- but it's a cliché we seem to have an endless appetite for: Witness the fascination with Britney Spears and her messy life. Their voices are backwards-looped and treated, their dances a jerky shuffle, all adding to a sense of mocking evil that the rest of the show never tries hard to shake. The show's most intense moments happen in a strange spirit-world, a red-draped room where a dwarf converses and dances with a pallid, marble-eyed eidolon of Palmer.
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David Lynch and Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks" begins with the discovery of a body and spends 30-odd episodes on the trail of a soul, both belonging to Laura Palmer, a prom queen of dazzling smile and doubtful habits.