Christina Aguilera: 'Oh Mother'

The fourth single from Christina Aguilera's Back To Basics album comes a whopping nine months after the third; it's being released solely on download in the lowest sales week of the year; and it's accompanied by a cheap-looking live performance video. It doesn't take Paul Gambaccini to get to the bottom of it all, does it? 'Oh Mother' is a half-arsed attempt to resuscitate an under-performing album.

Sadly, this tune isn't quite up to the job. A tremulous piano ballad on which Aguilera recalls the domestic violence of her childhood - "He took his anger out on her face, she kept all of her pain locked away" - it feels like a retread of 'I'm OK', a similarly-themed song from Aguilera's 2002 album Stripped. Worst of all, as it reaches its overwrought, vibrato-fuelled conclusion, it's hard not to wish you were listening to another tremulous ballad about parental abuse: 'Oh Father' by Madonna.