When Kelly Clarkson is aggrieved, all’s right with the world. That dates to her 2004 album, “Breakaway,” one of the most significant shape-shifts in recent pop memory, taking Ms. Clarkson from well-meaning “American Idol” winner to voice of the oppressed, thanks to venomous, high-energy rock-pop like “Since U Been Gone” and “Behind These Hazel Eyes.”
In the years since she’s wavered from that mission from time to time, trading her scorn for concern or reflection, but Ms. Clarkson’s voice is simply too huge, too violent to be reined in by warm feelings. Her pungent fifth album, “Stronger,” mostly gets that point, beginning with “Mr. Know It All,” one long, loud sigh: “Ain’t it, ain’t it something y’all/When somebody tells you something about you/Think that they know you more than you do.”
Why would you do that to Ms. Clarkson? By now it’s clear: She’s on a par with Taylor Swift when it comes to vengeance, and she’ll do it louder and with more brutality. (Ms. Swift’s bite is sweeter, but lasts longer.)
On “You Love Me” Ms. Clarkson lays her anger at her emotional abuser’s feet, then kicks it at him: “You said I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough/But what you really mean is you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough/You can’t deliver, so you turn it around.”
More than half the songs here cover similar ground, including “I Forgive You,” the intro of which is basically a “Since U Been Gone” cover; this happens on all of Ms. Clarkson’s albums, though — the shadow of that song, one of the pop highlights of the last decade, is too long to dodge completely.
That’s made for some of the loudest albums in pop. Even though the producers here — namely Greg Kurstin and Toby Gad — mostly can’t match the sheer intensity of the songs Ms. Clarkson made with Dr. Luke and Max Martin that set this template, they still shove other possibilities out of the frame.
Essentially everything here involves Ms. Clarkson’s clobbering her subject while getting clobbered with guitars. Long gone is Ms. Clarkson the aspiring R&B diva; gone is Ms. Clarkson the could-be country star. (For a listen to a couple of the many possible Ms. Clarksons, check out “The Smoakstack Sessions,” an EP released this week that includes acoustic versions of some of the “Stronger” songs, along with a too tepid version of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”) Ms. Clarkson is turning into the Mary J. Blige of pop: so good at being wounded that no one wants to let her heal.