Jennifer Lopez: AKA review – too many cooks bring little flavour

Jennifer Lopez spreads herself across so many mediums that when she collected an Icon award from Billboard magazine last month – the first woman to receive it – she felt obliged to note that music was her "first love". There's a similar sense of scrambling for position on her eighth studio album: "baddest bitch in the world right here," she asserts on Acting Like That, a hazy collaboration with acerbic Australian rapper Iggy Azalea. Though the track could also be read as post-divorce self-therapy, it conveys the feeling that Lopez has moved on from the generic party bangers of her 2011 LP, Love? And she has: AKA veers from power balladry to squawking hip-hop (shame about the name, but I Luh Ya Papi has a ferocious hookline) to an EDM track (First Love) that sweetly extols the pleasure of finding the right person long past the first flush of youth. The only problem? There are so many production cooks (and the ubiquitous Pitbull) that the broth is a bit characterless at times.