Britney may not look it, but she's still on top

Here's the deal with Britney Spears: There could not be a more unsympathetic figure in pop music today, and yet the 29-year-old's new, rave-influenced album "Femme Fatale" — her seventh, in a career that just keeps going — is gripping to the point where nothing matters but the songs.

Spears plays the Tacoma Dome Wednesday with Nicki Minaj, the new queen of hip-hop.

Spears spiraled on drugs and delusion in the mid-to-late aughts (similar to Charlie Sheen recently) and ended up so lost in gossip- media culture, it was like she forgot the whole thing hinged on schadenfreude for entertainment.

It's tough to isolate the most sickening moment. Her televised, chaotic marriage to Kevin Federline? Repeatedly showing her netherparts "on accident" for paparazzi, while exiting vehicles?

If you haven't kept up with Spears since she Lolita-sashayed through high-school halls in the music video for " ... Baby One More Time," her breakthrough single from 1999, the article to catch you up to speed is "Britney Spears: Inside an American Tragedy" in Rolling Stone. In the article — which appeared in "Best Music Writing 2009" (Da Capo Press) — Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote of "the most public downfall of any star in history," hammering home that Spears never had a chance at a healthy self-image, from her televised childhood on Disney's "The Mickey Mouse Club" to her adolescence as a pop star where her entire identity revolved around being a tween-aged sex object. Even as a 20-year-old, Spears had a song called, "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman."

Now she's a "Femme Fatale," according to her new album title. She looks a bit dazed. Spears barely moves in videos anymore, whereas she used to be a lively and underrated dancer. Photos and videos of the "Fatale" tour opener in Sacramento, Calif., show her slightly out of shape, getting a lot of mileage out of flipping her hair, performing in underwear surrounded by hunky guys doing much tougher choreography.

But she is singing, not lip-syncing — and pulling it off. She may seem less physically vital, but she still comes off savvy, with a shooting star like Nicki Minaj opening for her, and Spears' own music glued to the zeitgeist.

Sonically, "Femme Fatale" is undeniable. If you're susceptible to being whisked away by pumped-up synthesizer-and-bass anthems, "Fatale" makes the rest of the world vanish, perfectly soundtracking any moment when you want to become the beat. Blastoff single "Till the World Ends" lays out the MO: Move your body until you reach oblivion.

The music is tactile in ways that perfectly coincide with the American mainstreaming of the drug Ecstasy, which makes touch the primary sensation. "Femme Fatale" producers Dr. Luke and Max Martin — longtime Spears collaborators — rip off musical ideas from European dubstep and rave music (the dragging bass throbs and chopping drums of "Hold it Against Me"), which have crossed over to dominate the late-night portion of American festivals in recent years. The best song is the most textural — "How I Roll," a placid banger that sounds like an oddity in any context, much like Spears' "Toxic" did in 2003.

"How I Roll" and "Toxic" share a producer — Bloodshy, of the group Miike Snow — and though "How I Roll" features Spears' most direct come-on of the whole album, you hardly notice. The plink of the piano, the bend of the electronics-controlled voices, the ratchet effect on the drums — the whole track glides and clicks into place before your eyes, forming itself around you. You're dazzled by the sounds and how they make you feel. And in that moment, there is nothing else.

"Femme Fatale" also succeeds because Spears plays her own "slutty" character to absurdity. Every song starts on the dance floor and ends with "my bed, right now, let's go." That's been the case for a few albums now, but this is the first where it's all-in, all the time.

It could be that Britney's hand has been forced by producers who want to play into the hypersexual way she's perceived. Or that some record exec reasoned the raw power of sex, coupled with music that makes you turn off your brain, is enough to get the public to forget about Spears as an American tragedy.

But for the moment, she seems on top of it all, and it's hard to argue there isn't strength in her stance.

Andrew Matson blogs about music at www.seattletimes.com/matsononmusic. Reach him at matsononmusic@gmail.com