nellyfurtado_loose music reviews Virgin Media
First things first - if you're a fan of Furtado's semi-acoustic light
rock efforts of old, such as her breakthrough debut I'm Like A Bird,
you're going to find Loose something of a shock. Heralded in the UK
by the chart-topping Maneater - a huge synth-led pop number packed
with brassy vocals and stomping R&B beats - Loose features amongst
its team of writers and producers the genre-defining Timbaland. It
smacks a little of desperation that Furtado should bring in the big
guns to give her career a revamp, but whatever the motives, she's
pulled it off with admirable panache.
The dark-edged, reflective hip-hop of opener Afraid marks the
beginning of a rather bumpy, genre-hopping ride. Hip-hop is spliced
with Eighties synth-pop in the brilliant Promiscuous, menacing minor
key reggaeton gets an outing in the Spanish No Hay Igual, while the
fiery Latin pop ballad Te Busque doubtless broadened Furtado's market
considerably when it was released as a single in Mexico and South
America.
For all the album's inventiveness, though, there are similarities with
Gwen Stefani's Love.Angel.Music.Baby too strong to ignore - the
upbeat Eighties vibe of Do It, for instance, matches almost exactly
the tone of Stefani's quirky debut. When she's not aping Stefani,
meanwhile, Furtado lapses into some unpleasantly dreary territory -
the hackneyed All Good Things (co-written by Coldplay's Chris Martin)
closes the album on a damp note, while the god-awful In God's Hands
is perhaps the closest indication of what Furtado would sound like if
left to her own devices (featuring as it does only one co-writer
rather than the usual three).
Loose, as the name suggests, is a very haphazard collection of songs with little overall coherence - a hodge-podge of
genres, influences and producers. Ultimately, however, some great
tracks do emerge from the melée, performed confidently by
Furtado but pointing more to the talent of her team of producers and
co-writers.
