Circus

For better or worse, Spears is, as she says on the title track, "a put-on-a-show type of girl," and when she sticks to that credo, Circus works.

A pretty good pop album that follows the standard formula of filling space around singles with mediocre tracks.

This is a welcoming installment in the Spears saga and in the essence of former pop stars getting that one last shot at redemption.

Britney may have left the psych ward, but on Circus, she proves she's still a freak. The clubby, adventurous pop on her sixth album ... would have made a fine follow-up to 2003's In the Zone.

Not everything hits the target, even with her hands gripped tightly around the controls, but she’s offered us something intermittently wonderful that proves she can still black us out even when she’s on the up and up.

Circus isn't bad as pop albums go, but whether by default or design, it's substantially less edgy and exciting than its predecessor.

Wildly if transitorily enjoyable at turns, vacuous and ignorable at others, Circus doesn’t quite feel like a comeback, but I’m sure Brit’s not above merely bringing pre-comeback.

Moments of pop bliss occur more often than not on Circus, and as the public has been more than willing to do over the past year, it only makes sense to forgive Britney for trying to regress into teen-pop mode.

If she feels marginally more connected here than she did on Blackout, it's a Pyrrhic victory, as Circus never feels as sleek or addictive as its predecessor.

Obviously all is still not perfect in Britney’s world, but Circus still does more than enough to remind us of why she’s one of the world’s most iconic pop stars.

Spears needs to get over her "not a teen pop star, not yet a mature performer" phase and find herself before she succumbs to the same middle-of-the-road limbo as her more talented late-’90s teen-pop compatriot, Christina Aguilera.

What we have here, people, is the umpteenth attempt to turn the perceived chaos of Britney’s transition to adulthood – she’s 27 next week! – into sleazy, raunchy, dirrty adult-pop product.

On what should be her redemptive “back from the brink” album, Spears is immersed in an often trite, intensely narcissistic look at her existence, crafted almost entirely by songwriters other than herself.

Circus is almost as charmless, but at least it succeeds better than its predecessor in their intention of portraying the former Mouseketeer as some kind of robotic nymphomaniac doll.