Rihanna: Loud

(Def Jam)

***

What a difference a year has made for Rihanna, said Jim Farber in the New York Daily News. Roughly 12 months ago, the Barbadian beauty released Rated R, a bitter retort to the physical abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her recently dumped boyfriend, Chris Brown. But on her fifth album, only the merest traces of that vengeful spirit remain. Trading “pain for pleasure,” Rihanna reasserts herself on Loud as a party girl ready to hit the dance floor. Where Rated R “brooded with dark rhythms and dire pronouncements,” Loud “flirts and struts” with joy and confidence. Rihanna sounds like a “Caribbean-accented kitten with a whip” on the risqué “S&M,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly. On the dancehall duet “What’s My Name?” she coquettishly welcomes rapper Drake’s come-ons. All this “lurid sexuality” can at times feel artificial. “But what Loud showcases best is a star undefeated by her worst circumstances—and finding redemption” in the island-flavored dance-pop that made her famous in the first place.

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