THE album cover - with its cheapo graphics and a powdered-white Britney posing in a glittery costume and MJ's throwaway hat - is a dead giveaway.

The image is resolutely low-budget and high-crass: She comes across as more Euro-trash maven and less the eighth best-selling female artiste in American music history.

Still, there is nothing wrong with Euro-trash - after all, the songs on Britney Spears' fifth album are really Euro-trash done the American way.

'It's Britney, b***h,' she announces in the opening track, the sleazy yet insanely catchy single Gimme More. Top marks for self-awareness.

Tellingly, the album arrives at the nadir of her personal and career life, amid a series of bad press, including shaving her head and unleashing a brolly attack on the paparazzi.

Yet, against all odds, Blackout hits the right notes.

It preys on precisely the media's obsession with the pop star and her own ironic understanding that Britney is a killer branding honed for maximum publicity.

Her voice, for example, is unabashedly robotised to the point where she risks losing her humanity.

With a barrage of stop-start beats and hijacked by what sounds like a screeching chicken, the song, Piece Of Me, sums up her life in pithy aphorisms.

'I'm, Miss American Dream since I was 17... they still gonna put pictures of my derriere in the magazine... Guess I can't see no harm in working and being a mama,' she sings.

Sonically, she's on top of her game. Whatever the tabloids have to say about her personal mess, nothing can take away from the fact that she's delivered a stunning riposte to her detractors.

Working with Timbaland protege Nate Hills and the Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant has paid off handsomely.

Toy Soldier, a thinly veiled snide jab at her ex-husband Kevin Federline, is a case in point.

Brandishing a kind of wink-wink humour usually associated with someone like Gwen Stefani, the song, with its kooky martial beats, riffs on the extended metaphor: 'This time I need a soldier, I'm sick of toy soldiers/A boy that knows how to take care of me,/Won't be just coming over.'

Indeed, there's something irresistible yet insidious in interpreting every lust-crazed lyric of hers, especially since, at age 25, she's no longer a girl and definitely a woman.

In Ooh Ooh Baby, the singer coos: 'You know I have an appetite for sexy things/All you do is look at me, it's a disgrace.'

Therein lies her dilemma - as the album title Blackout suggests, she wants to be left alone, but how does one escape the limelight when your career depends on it?

Blackout
Britney Spears
Jive/Zomba/Sony BMG
*** 1/2