Whether she's playing it ``dirrty'' or sweet, trying to lift our self- esteem or liberate us on the dance floor, the one thing Christina Aguilera is not out to do is bore us.
But on much of her fourth album, Bionic, the pop diva with the multi-octave soul pipes does exactly that.
We have to at least give Aguilera credit where it's due for constantly attempting to reinvent herself. In her decade of stardom, she's gone from bubble-gum teen pop, to hyper-sexualized skank pop and R&B, to the stylish retro swing of her last album, Back To Basics. With Bionic, she's returned to the kinky stuff with an electro-pop dance twist that will certainly draw comparisons - whether Aguilera likes it or not - to the current queen of club land, Lady Gaga.
Bionic's title track - a catchy, robotic number - has Gaga all over it, and so does Not Myself Tonight, which also bears the mark of the fairy godmother of all risque divas, Madonna.
Both tracks are standouts on the album, and this strong momentum continues with the gleeful dance-floor raunch of Woohoo, about the joys of being serviced orally, and Elastic Love, a great co-write with electro-pop provocateur M.I.A.
If only that winning streak continued. Before long, however, Aguilera's sex- vixen shtick grows tired, hindering tunes like Desnudate and Prima Donna. Glam, meanwhile, wants desperately to be a new version of Madonna's Vogue, and the sentiments are every bit as vacant.
Then the album takes a really terrible turn for sensual slow jams (the nearly five-minute-long Sex For Breakfast) and heart-bleeding contemporary R&B ballads (such as Lift Me Up), which would be all right, if the songs were amazing, but they're not. Actually, they're painfully dull, despite Aguilera's usual vocal gyrations and over-emoting.
The worst of these has to be I Am, one of Aguilera's pep-talk-to-the-ladies ballads. Sample lyrics: ``I am timid and I am over-sensitive. I am a lioness. . . . I am naked. I am vulnerable. I am a woman,'' and so on.
I am gagging.
The 18-track disc rallies toward the end, thank goodness, when things get fun again. I Hate Boys, with its bouncy dance beat, is moronic but memorable, and My Girls, featuring feminist electro-punks Le Tigre and Peaches, is a girl- power anthem with a magnetic groove.
****Vanity is a pure ego trip so over the top, it's obviously tongue in cheek with lines like, ``Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the flyest bitch of them all? I am.''
If you are, Christina, then surely you can come up with something better than Bionic.
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