Rihanna - Loud
- Written by Greg Salter
For someone who could quite easily been accused of successfully managing to inject absolutely no personality into her music around the release of ‘Umbrella’, Rihanna’s performed a pretty significant artistic turnaround on her last couple of records. 2009’s Rated R and her handling of interviews during its promotion was an admirable response to the difficulties in her personal life – if the ballads were a little too much to handle at times, then tracks like ‘Rude Boy’ and ‘Hard’ were strong, addictive pop songs that still happily displayed the chinks in her previously impenetrable armour. Relatively free of the shadow of tabloid headlines and more musically consistent, Loud turns the lights up on Rated R without losing its ambition.
The first half of Loud is particularly strong and lives up to the album’s name. If anything, the brighter sound that Rihanna has embraced on this record along with her songwriters is something of an amalgamation of genres that she has explored elsewhere – dancehall returns with a vengence, with Rated R’s darker beats and flourishes relegated to the background. Meanwhile, the synths sound like they have the same bright pink-red energy of Rihanna’s newly dyed hair. If anything, the carefree but determined atmosphere sounds like a more appropriate reaction to the difficulties of the last few years than Rated R.
This energy makes the big songs almost impossible to resist. The big chorus on ‘S&M’ has you immediately forgetting the pretty flimsy verses, and vocally Rihanna appears to be making a marked effort to sound not quite as bored as she usually does. I do miss the old Disinterested Rihanna but, for the first time, she sounds confident and completely in control on Loud. The match-up between her and Drake on ‘What’s My Name?’ sounded iffy on paper, but they actually work well together and manage to make the age-old girl-just-wants-to-meet-a-bloke-who-knows-her-name story interesting.
‘Cheers (Drink To That)’ samples Avril Lavigne shouting on ‘I’m With You’ (they had to give her a songwriting credit and everything) for a decent take on the We’re Getting Drunk song genre – there’s an Ignition (Remix) reference, but no nod to Chumbawumba unfortunately. Enya even crops up on ‘Fading’ – it’s probably her best balled since ‘Take A Bow’, free of the baggage of those on Rated R. And then, of course, there’s ‘Only Girl (In The World)’, all huge synths and belted-out chorus. It’s. Not. Subtle. But then “I’MMA MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A MAAAAN” is a quite succinct and economical way of getting your point across in these situations, I would imagine. Some things are better off shouted.
If the rest of Loud doesn’t quite reach the first half’s highs, it’s not without its highlights. ‘Man Down’ is a strong slice of dancehall – she sounds particularly comfortable returning to her roots – and it’s interesting to hear her singing from a different viewpoint. Nicki Minaj puts in a typically demented performance on ‘Raining Men’, with Rihanna managing to hold her own too, while the heady ambience and scattered beats of ‘Skin’ are an interesting exploration in an alternative direction. Overall, if Loud can’t quite match Lady Gaga or Robyn for consistency, it’s still a confident, celebratory next step for Rihanna that both delivers on big, immediate singles and also suggests she’s in it for the long haul.