Album Review: The Spirit Indestructible by Nelly Furtado

On her fifth LP, Nelly Furtado tries awfully hard to be Rihanna – when she's not trying to be M.I.A. or Madonna. As for trying to be Nelly: That happens in songs like (gulp) "Bucket List" and (double gulp) "Believers (Arab Spring)" when Furtado lets her inner hippie emerge. Main producer Rodney Jerkins keeps the beats tight and hooks polished, but Furtado's flaming identity crisis makes this cringe listening.

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It takes a moment to realize just how long it took for Nelly Furtado to deliver a full-fledged follow-up to her blockbuster 2006 makeover Loose. That Timbaland-assisted shift toward the club arrived six years after her 2000 debut, and that's precisely the gap of time between Loose and its 2012 follow-up The Spirit Indestructible. Furtado wasn't exactly quiet during those six years -- halfway through she released the excellent Mi Plan with the Latin market in mind -- but it certainly can't be said that she capitalized on the smash success of "Promiscuous" and "Man Eater," so it shouldn't exactly come as a surprise that The Spirit Indestructible doesn't precisely play as pop, even if it has plenty of heavy, window-rattling beats and bass.

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It takes a moment to realize just how long it took for Nelly Furtado to deliver a full-fledged follow-up to her blockbuster 2006 makeover Loose. That Timbaland-assisted shift toward the club arrived six years after her 2000 debut, and that's precisely the gap of time between Loose and its 2012 follow-up The Spirit Indestructible. Furtado wasn't exactly quiet during those six years -- halfway through she released the excellent Mi Plan with the Latin market in mind -- but it certainly can't be said that she capitalized on the smash success of "Promiscuous" and "Man Eater," so it shouldn't exactly come as a surprise that The Spirit Indestructible doesn't precisely play as pop, even if it has plenty of heavy, window-rattling beats and bass.

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Growing up, my sisters and I agreed that big earrings looked heavy and uncomfortable. In contrast, “Big Hoops (Bigger the Better),” the lead single from Nelly Furtado’s fifth album, The Spirit Indestructible, finds the singer weightlessly expressing her sense of self-actualization vis-à-vis the size of her earrings. “The bigger the better, the better the bigger,” she tautaologizes, breaking up the mantra to drop lyrical shards from some of the tunes that soundtracked her adolescence (“No Diggity,” “Scenario,” “Express Yourself,” “Back and Forth,” “Passin’ Me By”), weaving a tapestry of youthful identity from pop-cultural signposts and shopping-mall fashion statements.

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Nelly Furtado followed her 10m-selling 2006 album, Loose, with a Spanish-language record, Mi Plan, creating a vacancy in the pop charts that was quickly filled by Rihanna and Katy Perry. Back, finally, with Loose's "proper" followup, Furtado no longer fits into the landscape – this album's first two singles flopped – and is taking a critical pasting for a record that's actually imbued with the same spanking pop savvy as Loose. "Want another banger?" she asks at the end of High Life, a question she answers by delivering an album containing half a dozen effervescent club tracks.

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Oh, the curious case of Nelly Furtado. After bursting on the scene in 2000 with Whoa, Nelly!, a collection of folk-leaning pop music that combined the wholesome notion of flying like a bird with the abrasive nature of claiming that there is noting but shit on the radio, Furtado up and did a 180 by ditching the hippie sandals for high-heeled glam with 200’‘s Loose. It was somewhat of an odd move—essentially mortgaging her future by hooking up with Timbaland to embark on a journey aimed at capitalizing more on sexuality than purity.

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