Slant Magazine's fantastic review of 'Bionic':
3/5 stars
After spending more than a decade being only passingly
entertained by either, it's not like I really want to keep
defining Christina Aguilera by comparing her minxy Betty to Britney
Spears's voracious Veronica. But Christina makes it so easy when she
snaps up the beat from Britney %%%#+'s "Gimme More" for the leadoff
single of Bionic, her long-awaited follow-up to 2006's Back
to Basics. She makes it easy when, in said leadoff, "Not
Myself Tonight," she dares to utter the word Britney only spelled out in
the still puzzling single-entendre of "If U Seek Amy." She really
makes it easy when she tries to one-up the Playskool procreation
balladry of Britney's "My Baby" by actually prefacing her own musical
version of mom jeans, "All I Need," with a few vocalizations from her
toddler son Max.
Unfortunately, it's her similarities with Brit that give Tina her
humanity. Because the differences—her vocal showboating, her
too-careful balancing act between club bangers and power ballads, her
conceptual rebound from Back
to Basics's retro into Bionic's futurism—all confirm
her as a living, humping, belting calculation. (She doesn't help matters
when she agrees to slap cover art on the new album depicting her as a
jigsaw Robotron with more mechanized cogs spinning behind those pouty
lips than Androids have apps.)
On the surface, Bionic is as efficient a pop
entertainment as was Circus.
For two-thirds of its running time, it pounds four on the floor, and
then spends the remaining third ponying up to the bar while the string
of slow jams bores almost everyone silly (except for all those winsome
little waif boys in the corner whose lives were saved many times over by
"Beautiful"). Aguilera's handpicked cadre of writers and
producers—M.I.A., Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, Le Tigre, Peaches, Sia,
Polow da Don, the son of Chic's Bernard Edwards, and, on the deluxe
edition, Santigold and Ladytron—are eclectic and intelligently applied,
if not necessarily the first group of names you'd select for a project
intended to predict the future, like an album-length reincarnation of
Donna Summer's "I Feel Love."
But it's all in service of routine pop sex, the sort of
standard-issue sleaze that Christina's "Dirrty," a monument in
maladaptive eroticism, stood in stark contrast against. With Bionic,
she takes the cash, she cashes the checks, she shows them the diva
snatch they want to see. She, having digested Gaga's muffin, builds up
an appetite for infantile genital tagging by extolling the savory
qualities of her "Woohoo," in which she chants, "All the boys think it's
cake when they taste my woohoo/You don't even need a plate, just your
face/Licky, licky, yum-yum." Icky, icky, ho-hum. (Throughout the song's
husky double-time sex hustle, Christina's mantra "woohoo" is repeated ad
nauseam, filtered so as to register as a cowbell.)
Elsewhere, in "Elastic Love," she flatly points out that her use
of the lyric "rubber band" is a metaphor, an observation rendered
totally redundant by M.I.A. and company's sonic Kegel exercises. If
analogies fail, boy does she make her bid to grab the gays back from the
clutches of Gaga explicit. Considering "I Hate Boys" (except the ones
who kiss boys) is closer than I ever thought Christina would ever come
to recording a Daphne
Aguilera track, it's ironically also one of many tracks on Bionic
that sound tailor-made to accompany the opening credits of Johnny
Weir's forthcoming reality show. None more so, though, than the
masquerade ball that is "Glam," a top-heavy cocktail that mixes one part
"Vogue" with two parts "Technologic" and serves with a snap.
Sure, her voice remains full, brash, and loud. Whatever it is
she's trying to say, she puts it out there with the conviction of a
tornado siren with a 10-inch dong lodged in its throat. But ultimately,
so much of what passes for hedonism on Bionic feels synthetic
and compulsory. "Sex for Breakfast," shallow orgasms for lunch. The
lube-slick but water-soluble Bionic is a party album without a
guest list, a sex toy used without self-awareness.
http://www.slantmagazine....ina-aguilera-bionic/2139