ARTIST: Britney Spears
TITLE: Blackout
LABEL: Jive/Zomba/BMG Japan
GENRE: Pop
GRABBER: EAC (Secure Mode)
ENCODER: Lame 3.97 / -V2 --vbr-new
QUALITY: 209 Kbps Avg / 44.1 KHz / Joint Stereo
PLAYTIME: 1h 00min 36sec total
SIZE: 90.60MB
RELEASE DATE: 2007-11-14
RIP DATE: 2007-11-19
Track List
----------
01. Gimme More (Produced By Danja) 4:11
02. Piece Of Me (Produced By Bloodshy & 3:32
Avant)
03. Radar (Produced By Bloodshy & Avant) 3:49
04. Break The Ice (Produced By Danja) 3:16
05. Heaven On Earth (Produced By Freescha 4:52
& Kara DioGuardi)
06. Get Naked (I Got A Plan) (Produced By 4:45
Danja)
07. Freakshow (Produced By Bloodshy & 2:55
Avant)
08. Toy Soldier (Produced By Bloodshy & 3:21
Avant)
09. Hot As Ice (Produced By Danja) 3:16
10. Ooh Ooh Baby (Produced By "Fredwreck" 3:28
Farid Nassar & Kara DioGuardi)
11. Perfect Lover (Produced By Danja) 3:02
12. Why Should I Be Sad (Produced By The 3:11
Neptunes)
13. Outta This World (JP Bonus Track) 3:45
(Produced By Danja)
14. Everybody (JP Bonus Track) (Produced 3:17
By Jonathan "J.R." Rotem)
15. Get Back (JP Bonus Track) (Produced By 3:50
Danja)
16. Gimme More (Oakenfold Remix) (JP Bonus 6:06
Track) (Produced By Paul Oakenfold)
Release Notes:
We're allowed to release this in its entirety because there are more than 30%
new tracks than the US Retail (4/12=33.3%). Producers added for your convenience
as well as to prevent duped filenames.
Silly industry: "It has also been said that this is the industry's way to get
consumers to purchase albums from Japanese distributors, instead of sometimes
less expensive imports from the West." -Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_track
Now instead of listening to crappy previews, have a real preview in perfect
quality. That's true try before you buy.
Why can't you just release one edition globally!@1 Makes it's so confusing and
pricey. I've bought many albums twice for the bonus tracks since it's so hard to
keep track of which edition is the "best." Example, Chris Brown - Exclusive. I
already bought the US Deluxe edition. But the JP Retail has an extra bonus track
*hint hint for groups* not found in the US Deluxe Edition, but it's minus a DVD.
WTF!? Now you have to decide if you want a DVD (I chose this because of the Kiss
Kiss music video), or an extra bonus track. And they wonder why people
download...people are fustrated they have to buy an album twice or even 3 times.
Wake up guys, the Girls Aloud album has yet to be released. Someone do it! I
don't live in the UK, so unfrotunately I can't get it (I would if I could), but
we here just want to help out everyone, because in the end it's all about the
music, right?! Been slow lately...so I figured I'd help out and get some word
out.
600 dpi scans included of all the color pages. 200dpi for the Japanese booklet,
and I only scanned the English parts, since doing the Japanese parts would be
redundant. Brit looks quite hot in the covers pics if you ask me; I guess that's
the magic of PS though ;).
I think this album is fire. Definately worth the $30+. Gotta love the production
of Danja and that sample of Eurythmics on track 14 is slick. Piece Of Me is
slated to be the next single, gotta love who ever did the lyrics up for that
track, mentioning my home country :D
----------
Public image is vital to pop stars, but few stars have been so inextricably tied
to their image as Britney Spears. Think back to "...Baby One More Time" -- it
has an indelible hook but what leaps to mind is not the sound of the single, but
how Britney looked in the video as she pouted and preened in a schoolgirls'
uniform, an image as iconic as Madonna's exposed navel. Every one of Britney's
hits had an accompanying image, as she relied on her carefully sculpted
sexpot-next-door persona as much as she did on her records, but what happens
when the image turns sour, as it certainly did for Britney in the years
following the release of In the Zone? When that album hit the stores in 2003,
Britney had yet to marry, had yet to give birth, had yet to even meet
professional layabout Kevin Federline -- she had yet to trash her girl-next-door
fantasy by turning into white trash. Some blamed Federline for her rapid
downward spiral, but she continued to descend after splitting with K-Fed in the
fall of 2006, as each month brought a new tabloid sensation from Britney, a
situation that became all the more alarming when contrasted to how tightly
controlled her public image used to be. The shift in her persona came into sharp
relief at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, as she sleepwalked through a
disastrous lip-synch of her comeback single "Gimme More," a disaster by any
measure, but when it was compared to such previous meticulously staged VMA
appearances as her make-out with Madonna in 2003, it made Britney seem like a
lost cause and fallen star.
All this toil and turmoil set the stage for her 2007 comeback Blackout to be a
flat-out train wreck, which it decidedly is not -- but that doesn't mean it's a
triumph, either. Blackout is an easy album to overpraise based on the lowered
expectations Britney's behavior has set for her audience, as none of her antics
suggested that she'd be able to deliver something coherent and entertaining, two
things that Blackout is. As an album, it holds together better than any of her
other records, echoing the sleek club-centric feel of In the Zone but it's
heavier on hedonism than its predecessor, stripped of any ballads or
sensitivity, and just reveling in dirty good times. So Blackout acts as a
soundtrack for Britney's hazy, drunken days, reflecting the excess that's
splashed all over the tabloids, but it has a coherence that the public Britney
lacks. This may initially seem like an odd dissociation but, in a way, it makes
sense: how responsible is Britney for her music, anyway? At the peak of her
popularity, she never seemed to be dictating the direction of her music, so it
only stands to reason that when her personal life has gotten too hectic, she's
simply decided to let the professional producers create their tracks and then
she'll just drop in the vocals at her convenience. Even the one song that plays
like autobiography -- "Piece of Me," where she calls herself "Miss American
dream since I was 17" and "I'm miss bad media karma/another day another drama,"
complaining "they stick all the pictures of my derriere in the magazines," as if
she wasn't posing provocatively for Rolling Stone as soon as "Baby" broke big --
was outsourced to "Toxic" producer/writers Bloodshy & Avant, who try desperately
to craft a defiant anthem for this tabloid fixture, as she couldn't be bothered
to write one on her own. Instead, she busies herself with writing the album's
two strip-club anthems, "Freakshow" and the brilliantly titled "Get Naked (I Got
a Plan)" (surely the successor to such trash-classics as Soundmaster T's "2 Much
Booty (In Da Pants)" and Samantha Fox's timeless pair of "Touch Me (I Want Your
Body)" and "(Hurt Me! Hurt Me!) But the Pants Stay On"). Every piece of gossip
in the four years separating In the Zone and Blackout suggests that her head is
in the clubs, yet it's still a bit disarming to realize that this is all that
she has to say.
Britney may not have much on her mind but at least she pockets so deep she can
buy the best producers, hiring Bloodshy & Avant, the Clutch and the Neptunes,
among others, to help craft an album that cribs from Rhianna's sleek, sexy Good
Girl Gone Bad and the chilly robo-R&B of Justin Timberlake's
FutureSex/LoveSounds. Emotionally, this isn't a progression from In the Zone,
but it is a cannily contemporary dance album, sounding nearly as fresh as
Rhianna and JT, even if it's hardly as trendsetting as either. Then again,
Britney hasn't set the pace for the sound of dance-pop since her first two Max
Martin-driven productions, and her skill -- conscious or not, it doesn't really
matter -- has always been to get the right producers at the right moment, which
she surely does here. Those producers turn Blackout into a sleek, shiny
collection of 12 guiltily addictive dance tracks where the only weak link is
Britney herself. Never the greatest vocalist, her thin squawk could be dismissed
early in her career as an adolescent learning the ropes, but nearly a decade
later her singing hasn't gotten any better, even if the studio tools to
masquerade her weaknesses have. Strangely enough, the computer corrections
either emphasize her irritating, strangled delivery -- nowhere more so than on
"Piece of Me," where she's sharp, flattened, and clipped, the vocoder stabbing
at the ears like a pick -- or she disappears into the track entirely, just
another part of the electronic tapestry. Naturally, the latter cuts are more
appealing, as they really show off the skills of the producers, particularly the
Clutch's lead single "Gimme More," Bloodshy & Avant's relentless "Radar," the
new wave shimmer of "Heaven on Earth," the stuttering electro-clip of "Break the
Ice," or the spare, silly chant of "Hot as Ice." When Britney is pushed to the
forefront, she garners too much attention, as she tries too hard to be sexy -- a
move she could pull off before, when carefully controlled pictures of her in
schoolgirl uniforms, cat suits, and tight jeans filled in the blanks her voice
left behind. Now, those images are replaced by images of Britney beating cars up
with umbrellas, wiping her greasy fingers on designer dresses, and nodding off
on-stage, each new disaster stripping away any residual sexiness in her public
image, so when she tries to purr and tease on Blackout she repels instead of
seduces. That's the new Britney, and as she's always been an artist who relies
on image, her tarnished persona does taint the ultimate effect of her music, as
knowledge of her ceaseless partying turns these anthems a bit weary and sad. But
if you block that image out -- always hard to do with Britney, but easier to do
here since the tracks sound so good -- Blackout is state-of-the-art dance-pop, a
testament to skills of the producers and perhaps even Britney being somehow
cognizant enough to realize she should hire the best, even if she's not at her
best.
Don't forget to support the artists! We did.
Group News
----------
We're looking for:
-Rippers With Unreleased Music, New Promo or Pre/Retails.
-Peeps with albums 2003 and older for Internal VBR ripping and archiving.
-Secure EU/AS HQs.
If you have any of the above, find us.
Greets to all the groups who put out quality releases, our sites for hosting
us and people who have helped along the way.
