Christina Aguilera: Lotus

After her 2010 album, Bionic, was largely deemed disappointing, the singer returns with an impressive collection of pop ballads.

Christina Aguilera has said that she named her album after a flower that "survives under the hardest conditions". Jonathan Alcorn / Reuters

Christina Aguilera
Lotus
RCA
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While Mary J Blige sang Roses and The White Stripes offered us a Blue Orchid, it's the lotus that attracts Christina Aguilera. "My album title represents an unbreakable flower that survives under the hardest conditions and still thrives," the 31-year-old singer recently gushed on Twitter.

As a coach on the US vocal talent show The Voice since last year, Aguilera has been party to the cloyingly emotive triumph-over-adversity stories such shows routinely deploy. It's interesting, then, that Lotus has something of the phoenix from the ashes about it, too.

"I say goodbye to the scared child inside … embrace the woman I've become," she sings on Lotus Intro, its arrangement a lattice of soft-pulsing voices and fat kick drum. She didn't seem to have much of a scared child about her in the promo video for her 2002 hit Dirrty, but then appearances can be deceptive.

To be fair, Aguilera has been on the back foot lately. Even if her guest slot on Maroon 5's Moves Like Jagger made her ubiquitous earlier this year, her 2010 album Bionic was largely deemed disappointing, and last year she divorced from her husband Jordan Bratman, the father of her 4-year-old son Max.

On Lotus, any resulting vulnerability is contained within the album's brace of show-stopping power ballads. "All I have is three million melodies to cure the hurt," Aguilera sings on Sing For Me, its spare backing throwing the pint-sized diva's still-astonishing vocal prowess into stark relief. Its piano-led counterpart Blank Page is as emotionally manipulative as an X Factor final, but like Jim Steinman essaying another telegraphed chorus for Meat Loaf, you find yourself going with it.

Elsewhere, the majority of Lotus is about moving on. The flagship single Your Body is anthemic, ear-candy-crammed electropop produced by Max Martin and Shellback, while Red Hot Kinda Love, all cooed hooks and frivolity, suggests Aguilera hasn't been spending her nights without Bratman playing solitaire.

Though Army of Me has too idiosyncratic a title not to have been cribbed from the Björk song and Just A Fool – an incongruous duet with the Grammy-nominated country singer Blake Shelton – is too brazen an attempt at crossover appeal to fully endorse, Lotus's decent quota of exhilarating pop impresses. Best of all, perhaps, is Make the World Move, which features Cee Lo Green. "Turn up the love / turn down the hate," roars Aguilera. Now who could argue with that?