CD: Britney Spears - Femme Fatale

Googling for academic articles about Britney Spears is one rabbit hole I've managed to avoid falling down thus far, but one imagines there are reams of the things. From demonically driven Disney child star via pigtailed Lolita and sex-droid air hostess to shaven-headed loon lunging aggressively towards her public through the paparazzo's lens, she's provided no end of provocative and iconic images, and stirred up all kinds of problematic issues around post-feminism, celebrity and voyeurism, while remaining an odd non-presence at the centre of it all.

Not an obvious provocateur like Madonna or Lady Gaga, she generally comes over as either a simple down-home, hard-partying Southern gal thrown adrift in a media culture, or a rootless and unreal product and inhabitant of that culture. This is a young woman who has been literally the most famous person in the world - the original "Number One search term" of the internet age - whilst undergoing complete personality meltdown. Anyone with a stack of Baudrillard books and a bag of strong drugs could easily theorise on that until their head fell off.

Oh, and Britney makes consistently amazing records too. Not just that patronising term “amazing pop records”, but amazing records full stop, with her albums growing in consistency and quality up until the absolutely extraordinary electronic club album Blackout (2007) – which was recorded and released at the height of her breakdown and concomitant constant deranged game of kiss chase with the LA paparazzi. Sadly the follow-up, Circus, was frankly a bit slapdash, and with the age of 30 approaching and younger, hungrier Gagas and Rihannas snapping at her heels, it looked as if Britney as lady mayoress of pop might be on the wane.

Thankfully she wasn't on the wane at all, and Femme Fatale is another great Britney album. OK, it's not as good as Blackout, mainly because it hasn't got the belligerent middle-finger-to-the-world attitude of songs like “Freakshow” and “Piece of Me”, and instead is overladen with rather tired saucy single-entendres like, “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?” (“Hold it Against Me”) and “I wanna go all the way” (“I Wanna Go”). Every single song is about sex: sex with dangerous exes, break-up sex, sex on a night out, sex as a relief from life's pressures, sex as dancing, dancing as sex, etc etc etc. And, providing more fodder for the academics, just about every song treats men as sexual objects, anonymous conquests, dangerous animals, or simply a pleasure to be bought (as on “Drop Dead Beautiful”: “I would pay whatever just to get a better view”).

It's almost all set to hefty uptempo dance grooves, with Britney's voice frayed at the edge by weird and druggy effects. The much trumpeted “dubstep influence” is there as part of the palette of club sounds the producers draw from, but actually no more so than on Blackout – the frankly filthy “Inside Out” here does have dubstep's lurching half-tempo rhythm throughout, but really is as much based on American R&B at its most vainglorious as anything else, and it has less of dubstep's wobbly bass than Blackout's "Freakshow" did. There's a Will.I.Am collaboration too in “Big Fat Bass”, which thankfully sees him in the same mode as Black Eyed Peas's great “Boom Boom Pow”, creating super-high-tech rubberised bouncing electro and sonic innuendos aplenty. Overall, if you don't like fizzing, buzzing, whirling electronic sounds that beset you from all angles and tickle your underparts unbidden, then... well, I'm surprised you've read this far really, but no, this album really isn't for you.

Actually the relentlessness of the robot rave sounds and demands to drink neat spirits, go clubbing, “fly higher” and have athletic sex could get a bit much for just about anyone if they're more in the mood for Antiques Roadshow and a nice lamb casserole. But at most other times than Sunday evening, the way it all holds together sweeps you along, and Britney's mad, sparkly, shag-happy world doesn't seem such an awful place to be at all. Where she actually is in all of this and what she's thinking beyond, ooh I fancy doing some bonking, is, as ever, hard to fathom – but the fact that she's made it so far, somehow marshalling music of this intensity into such a coherent form around her, suggests that she might very well yet continue staunchly on into the Gaga era, making lots more great records. Which is good news for cultural theorists and pop lovers alike.

• Read Britney Spears (1998-Now): The Video Special on theartsdesk

• Find Femme Fatale on Amazon
• Download Femme Fatale on iTunes

Watch the video for Britney's "Hold it Against Me"