Liberation

With Liberation, Aguilera is at her most artistically emancipated since Stripped (2002).

Her eighth album is a healthy mix of hit-chasing, theatrics and soon-to-be classic power ballads that emphasize her immense skills over half-baked conceptual themes.

Her extravagant vocal flourishes connect with sweeping emotion. ... The album’s seduction songs do their job. But its doleful ones leap out.

It’s a well-calculated offering from a living legend whose abilities are still very much intact.

An album that keeps pace with modern pop trends while remaining true to Aguilera’s past.

The general rule for Liberation is that the less hard Aguilera sounds like she’s trying, the more enjoyable the album is.

The greater flaw of Liberation is how its blend of R&B reflection and tense testifying doesn't seem to be an easy fit on any format in 2018. This weakness is also a strength, as it shows that Aguilera didn't take an easy route with Liberation: she instead found a hybrid between the personal and commercial, which makes the record resonate emotionally no matter what success it may or may not have.

Even at its busiest, though, the music emphasizes Aguilera’s powerful voice, which more than anything is what separates her from the younger stars whose popularity has eclipsed hers in recent years. She runs through the full gamut of moods, from flirty to depressed to joyful to furious--each a response, or so we’ve been trained to think, to some real-life situation.

While it isn’t without a few bumps along the way, Liberation really is a welcome return to form for one of this era’s greatest vocalists.

These ["Maria," "Sick of Sittin’" and "Fall in Line"] are sturdy moments on an album that feels less like an end in itself than a promising first step toward a genuine pop rebirth—moments that are strong enough to inspire hope for Aguilera’s own The Velvet Rope or, at least, My Love Is Your Love. She has certainly still got the range.

Liberation may lack the grand ambition and massive pop bangers of her glory days, but by the end, it’s hard to deny that she feels reasonably relevant and contemporary again.

Every track is polished and purposeful, but the sheer busy quality of her singing and overactive variety of the production ensures that Liberation never settles into a coherent listening experience.

Liberation sounds like it suffered a crisis of confidence midway through, as if Aguilera was beset by doubts at her ability to pull off a whole album of modern R&B. A shame, not least because her boldness in reinventing herself was always one of her most impressive facets.

“Accelerate” never takes off like one might expect, content to bustle along on a perpetually shifting beat, rumbling electro bassline, and skittering trap effects, fading out while the singer sensually vamps over a minimal backing track. Unfortunately, the rest of Liberation plays it frustratingly safe, with smooth, competent R&B like “Deserve” and “Pipe.”

Tracks like the reggae-tinged “Right Moves”--which feels like it was supposed to be an ANTI cut--and “Pipe” come off as monotonous. But there is a lot of Aguilera’s sincere authenticity that is weaved throughout Liberation. It may not be a pop record, a hip hop record or a soul record, but it’s certainly an Xtina record.