Aguilera has repeatedly proved herself since “Genie in a Bottle” in 1999 - doesn’t always reward big, natural voices as it once did, especially for singers who aren’t named Adele. Her extravagant vocal flourishes connect with sweeping emotion. Heard as a whole - unlikely as that might be in 2018 - it’s an album that moves through trauma, lust, resistance, obsession and, finally, lasting love. It’s an album of extreme ups and downs: wretched and ecstatic, calculating and abandoned, seesawing between angst and raunch. It’s a return to the pop fray after multiple seasons as a coach on “The Voice” that made sure viewers didn’t forget her vocal mastery. She unleashes all of them on “Liberation,” her eighth studio album and her first since “Lotus” in 2012. Her voice is not an instrument for making modest statements it’s about peaks of self-affirmation, indescribable sensual pleasures, steely counterattacks and abysses of sorrow. She can belt and she can tease she can aim a note as directly as a missile or turn its trajectory into an aerobatic spiral of leaping, quivering, scalloping melismas.

She can be brassy, tearful, sultry, gritty, breathy, sweet or furious. Nothing less than high drama suits Christina Aguilera’s voice.

Christina aguilera cd 2018