Loud
After responding to staggering emotional and physical trauma with the melodramatic Rated R, Rihanna returns to making effervescent pop.
Released almost a year to the day after Rihanna’s previous effort, Rated R, Loud purports to leave behind that album’s comparatively dark mood for a bright, sassy revival. Considering that she’s been pumping out an album a year since 2005, these claims of reinvention are suspect; how much artistic growth can anyone…
Loud would not sound quite so slapdash if it did not follow Good Girl Gone Bad, one of the best pop albums of its decade, and Rated R, one of the most fascinating pop albums of the same time frame.
Enough to warm up this extremely cold winter season...With her newfound bad girl image, pop Princess Rihanna is more Grace Jones than Catherine Zeta-Jones these days.
While geeks like me like to sit around debating the merits of Rihanna's sustainability this far into her career -- being that she can't sing -- the moment...