Be careful what you wish for. After years of hoping that Christina Aguilera would drop the self-seriousness long enough to stop desperately trying to prove herself, she comes up with the frustratingly lifeless Bionic. What was misrepresented as an experimental and futuristic foray into electronic music, aided by a stable of the genre's best, is in reality a juvenile, clumsy farce in which inspiration seems absent. There's even a downside to the album's strongest tracks, the Switch-produced "Elastic Love" and "Bionic," as they ape their influences so thoroughly that they all but disappear. Why listen to Aguilera's inconsequential interpretations of M.I.A. and Santigold when we already have Kala and Santogold? After repeatedly name-dropping those two women, along with Ladytron, Goldfrapp, Le Tigre and Sia, as co-conspirators, Aguilera seems to have shifted gears mid-album, diluting Bionic's tracklisting with feeble, dated offerings from Tricky Stewart, Polow da Don and Focus.
With the Ladytron and Santigold collaborations relegated to bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of the album and Goldfrapp's presence withdrawn entirely, M.I.A. and Le Tigre are left to contribute one track apiece. In the end, Sia is the real survivor of these much-hyped songwriting sessions, as three of her four co-writes remain. And yet, her best ballad hit the cutting room floor, banished to the b-side bin with other songs infinitely more interesting than the junk that remains on this strangely sequenced trainwreck. Odes to make-up, oral sex and ... sex abound. There's the schoolyard chant "I Hate Boys," which finds Aguilera rhyming "bananas" with "bananas." There's "Glam," where she encourages listeners, in a moment you can only hope is parody, to "be superficial." She strikes a sexbot pose on "Desdunate," weds herself on the hilarious "Vanity" and comes up with a new use for the word "woohoo" ...
All the boys think it's cake when they taste my woohoo
You don't even need a plate, just your face, ha
Licky licky yum yum.
Who knew that Aguilera's vision for the future was so inane? Who knew that four years of development would result in something so lackluster and half-hearted? There's not a single song here half as good as the better moments on Stripped or Back to Basics. Even Aguilera's teen pop debut wasn't this creatively inept. In fact, Bionic would be entirely forgettable if it wasn't so damn flabbergasting. After nearly a decade of ardently attempting to stand out, there's not a lot here that would sound out of place coming from today's gaggle of interchangeable Auto-Tuned popsters. Bionic has some really dubious decision-making on display and will probably wind up as something that Aguilera would like to pretend never happened. It's ultimately a visionless testament to what could have been.
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Christina Aguilera
