Trip To Your Heart - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

At Metacritic, Femme Fatale holds an average score of 67 out of 100 (indicating "generally positive reviews") based on 25 reviews from mainstream music critics. Jody Rosen of Rolling Stone commented that it "may be Britney's best album; certainly it's her strangest". Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine viewed that Spears' presence on the album is overshadowed by its "high-class" production, calling the album "essentially a cleaner, classier remake of the gaudily dark Blackout a producer’s paradise". Robert Everett-Green of The Globe and Mail gave the album three-and-a-half out of four stars and complimented its "grainy, glistening electronic sound", calling it "one of the major guilty pleasures in pop this year". Kitty Empire of The Observer commented that Spears "has turned out the “fierce dance record” she promised". Ailbhe Malone of NME viewed it as her "best work" and wrote that it "brims with the laidback confidence of someone who knows she's back on top."

MSN Music's Robert Christgau gave the album a B+ rating, indicating "remarkable one way or another, yet also flirts with the humdrum or the half-assed". Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani commented that Spears's lack of involvement makes "the success of a Britney song rest almost entirely on the quality of other people's songwriting and production, and almost every track on Femme Fatale succeeds or fails on that basis". Los Angeles Times writer Carl Wilson felt that the album "finds unity of subject, style and sound by imagining scenarios in which vanishing into anonymity can be comfort and liberation". Tom Gockelen-Kozlowski of The Daily Telegraph felt that, "despite her weak voice and empty lyrics, has placed herself at the avant-garde of pop with this masterful mixture of über-cool dubstep and sugary pop". The A.V. Club's Genevieve Koski wrote that Spears "settles into, game for whatever and confident in the hands of trusted professionals who know how to best utilize her".

In a mixed review, Andy Gill of The Independent criticized its "single-minded dedication to dancefloor utility" and observed "only the tiniest of rhythmic variants or differences in electronic tones distinguishing one producer's work from another's". Jon Caramanica of The New York Times commented that "much of the music on this album feels flat and redundant, no more invigorating than the average European dance-pop album of five years ago". The Guardian's Alexis Petridis wrote that Spears' "voice is as anonymous as ever, a state of affairs amplified by the lavishing of Auto-Tune". Evan Sawdey of PopMatters wrote that "Spears' worldview is completely self-contained" and described Femme Fatale as "just a big dumb club album". Rich Juzwiak of The Village Voice wrote that her "voice doesn't add much to the conversation", writing that her lack of presence is "problematic for an album whose subject matter is hedonism and how being hot facilitates it".