“Accelerate” [ft. Ty Dolla $ign & 2 Chainz]

Christina Aguilera is reconstructing her sound for her first album in nearly six years, Liberation. Her comeback single, “Accelerate,” a collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign and 2 Chainz, is certainly a liberation from something, though it’s unclear what—if not conventional songcraft, then perhaps the formulaic chaff of her last few albums. It’s also produced by Kanye West, in a time when Kanye is making the worst decisions of his career. Aguilera probably has mixed feelings about that, but pop artifice is reliant on getting people to pay attention. And if “Accelerate” is one thing, it’s certainly attention-grabbing. There’s a fun song (or two) trapped in here somewhere, between several mutations, but without any sort of constancy or meaningful direction, it isn’t much of a song at all; it’s a series of disjointed episodes with superfluous parts.

Unlike the majority of songs on 2012’s Lotus, which were unadventurous and uncomplicated power pop, “Accelerate” is unduly busy, sometimes even spasmodic in its progressions. The opening production invokes the scene in Kanye’s Runaway where he messes around with his MPC drum pad, as a winged Selita Ebanks convulses to the rhythm. It arbitrarily erupts into synths before breaking down into a percussive chug; the programmed glitchy vocal samples and add-ons are meant to be ornamental but they comes off as excessive. The performers all move curiously, if not dutifully, upon the stage Kanye has set forth, yet they seem to be looking around at each other for cues. It’s confounding that a song with this much talent doesn’t seem to know what to do with any of it.

“Accelerate,” like so many of Xtina’s songs, seems to misunderstand what is great about her: those pipes, capable of weapons-grade vocal runs set to vaporize. She should be wrapping her golden throat around something like Demi Lovato’s operatic “Sorry Not Sorry.” In “Accelerate,” she offers blasé, understated croons at odds with her chatty lyrics about partying and being ‘bout that life. “Fuck all these drugs, fuck all these clubs/What’s wrong with me?” Ty blurts out randomly, going off message like a robot host suddenly becoming self-aware mid narrative. Even the 2 Chainz verse is innocuous, a set of bottom-tier stunt raps about having a sex drive like Nascar and whatnot. He raps the words “Don’t forget the hashtag” and “You ain’t got internet?” as if to stoke online discourse. It’s sort of fitting that “Accelerate” is the sonic equivalent of expanding tweets to 280 characters; unnecessarily mixing and inflating ideas when far less would do.