With her last album ‘Loud’ still a chart fixture, Rihanna has released her sixth studio album ‘Talk that Talk.” The first single, “We Found Love,” has already topped the charts in the US. First week sales of the album are likely to follow suit.
Conceptually, ‘Talk That Talk’ plays like a confident companion piece to ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’, which shot Rihanna to superstardom with “Umbrella.” This album manages to balance gangsta swagger and dance-floor insistence in a way that highlights Rihanna’s unique presence on the pop music scene. The proceedings begin with the effortless mid-tempo jam “You Da One.”
“Where Have You Been” shows strokes of production genius as a sweltering electro-pop song seems emerge from a modest opener, exploding into a surprising and engulfing club track. “We Found Love” cements the sentiment as a more restrained yet energetic segue into a mid-section of tracks that would make Ms-Jackson-If-You’re-Nasty raise an eyebrow. “Suck my cockiness, lick my persuasion,” Rihanna intones on one of the harder R&B cuts, “Cockiness (Love It). “Birthday Cake” is a 78-second frenzy full of sentiments unprintable in this publication. The title track finds Jay-Z trading verses on a crowd-pleaser sure to find itself on the airwaves in the near future.
Rihanna is arguably the most convincing when braking on the nastiness. The sprawling and atmospheric “Drunk on Love” is among the best tracks, with the vocal delivery showing a side of Rihanna, perhaps unintentionally, that seems generally absent: vulnerability.
It doesn’t take long for Ri to get back to the sex. “Watch’n’Learn” is easily one of the dirtiest pop songs in recent memory. That highlights Rihanna’s problem, as she regularly relies on shock and hedonism to avoid substance. ‘Talk That Talk’ is a thoroughly enjoyable album from start to finish, but it doesn’t aim for anything more than a good time.
The entire album is a vast improvement over her last effort in every regard, but the best is likely to come when Rihanna trades in the XXX for a little soul.
Rating: B+