BY JOE DIMUZIO
Daily Arts Writer
Published November 14, 2010
Rihanna is such a tease. From “Pon De Replay” to “Disturbia,” her singles pop. She commands her cameos, however brief. The tabloids never let her go. Preview snippets for Rated R had message boards convinced she would become the queen of dubstep. She’s made Jay-Z look silly, twice.
Rihanna
Loud
Def Jam
More like this
Your perfect pop diva, Rihanna is sexy and malleable. But when you step down from the highs of songs like “Umbrella” and “Rude Boy,” there’s not much footing for a long-term relationship. It’s just too tough to figure out what she really wants.
Loud is her fifth frustrating release, built on towering singles, promising misfires and a couple duds. Following Rated R, an album hyped more by her Chris Brown backstory than the music itself, Loud finds her comfortably upbeat again, with variety, pomp and red hair. Because it’s loud, get it?
This sort of cheap role play prevents Rihanna from owning some of the tunes here. On ballads like “Fading” and the Taylor Swiftian “California King Bed,” she steers hard into middle-of-the-road territory. Opener and third single “S&M” is a slick, efficient palette swap of David Guetta’s “Sexy Chick,” with a 4/4 Euro stomp and HI-NRG backing vocals. But it aims for sexy and comes across as Hot Topic. With “Sex in the air / I don’t care / I love the smell of it / sticks and stones may break my bones / but whips and chains excite me,” she sounds like she’s faking it.
Rihanna’s best moments are her most natural, and when it comes to massive singles and the occasional embrace of her Caribbean side, she nails it. Second single “What’s My Name?” features Drake, serving the same purpose Jay-Z did on “Umbrella,” turning in a limp intro and unintentionally lending Rihanna’s entrance heavenly proportions. It’s a slick StarGate production built on tense snare and a chorus whose parts sum up beautifully. “Only Girl (In the World)” is Max Martin-huge, with a stop-and-start chorus that takes three whole turns of the ignition to drop the beat, at once torturous and indelible. Here, “Want you to make me feel / Like I’m the only girl in the world / Like I’m the only one that you’ve ever loved” is a declaration, not a request.
Then there are furious moments of promise. “Raining Men” has a schizo-speed freak verse from Nicki Minaj, sub-bass, lightning hi-hats and a Beyoncé-light vocal turn by Rihanna, with nowhere else to go. “Man Down,” the most distinct but undercooked cut on the album, offers a Reggaeton murder ballad evoking Grace Jones drama and falling short. On “Love the Way You Lie (Part II)” Rihanna tries admirably to recapture the song for herself and misfires, leaving Eminem, still refusing to work with a beat, clumsily talkin-loud-and-saying-nothing, sounding absolutely terrible.
In a BBC interview, Rihanna propped up Loud; "I wanted songs that were all Rihanna songs, that nobody else could do. … I wanted a song, or songs … that had that little West Indian vibe to it, had that certain tone, a certain sass and a certain energy." That “certain energy” is exactly what can take Rihanna higher: the fleeting moments when she marries her character with shiny, defiant pop gloss. But her promise is still just promise, and for now the engagement is indefinite.
