Nelly Furtado - The Spirit Indestructible

In the six years that have passed since Loose, the whole world of Timbaland-produced R&B-pop has completely disintegrated. The birth of eurodance with the likes of Ke$ha and Lady GaGa, coupled with the continuing hipsterfying of hip hop (The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Drake), has kind of left the world of autotune a bit forlorn. Unless you're backed by a stomping beat, you've got no chance.

So how did the English comeback (let's ignore 2009's Mi Plan on account of there never being a good song recorded in Spanish than Santana and Shakira's material.) of Nelly Furtado go? A little disastrously. It's a fickle world. Only half a decade ago Furtado was commanding: Maneater a pop single most current females would kill for, All Good Things (Come to an End) a magnificent ballad. Since then, there were brief flashes of brilliance - a demo version of Girlfriend in this City showed real promise but was then stripped of its strings and disappeared. Where do we go from here?

Straight away Furtado jumps aboard the dub-pop bandwagon with a frenetic, chirpy 'Spirit Indestructible' that's pretty full of energy, but a touch too reminiscent of Phil Collins' Another Day in Paradise melody to really stand on its own, unlike comeback single 'Big Hoops (Bigger the Better)'. It's difficult to mistake the innuendo: this isn't a song about earrings. Therefore soaked in sex ("I can go fast, I can go slow, I can go places nobody else goes"), the track is pretty much a certified banger, and one of the catchiest pop hooks of the year. Why it didn't perform better I can only guess (poor promotion, a touch too long away from the English-speaking industry). The breakdown at the end is pretty spectacular, too.

Sadly, the hooks from hereon out get progressively disingenuous. On 'High Life' a choir is drafted in for a chorus of "la la"s and, other than the whole track's clicking rhythm, it fails to seize you. In a similarly irritating fashion, 'Parking Lot' - the album's third single - consists of a pretty shameful M.I.A. imitation and some guttural vuvuzela hook. Towards the more listenable end of the song's spectrum she drafts in a cute melody but has nothing to sing over it, so just goes "na-na eh eh" a few times. She pulls off something of a coup, though, in drafting in Nas for 'Something', a straightforward urban track with an understated loop and snare drums which is all so contemporary or whatever. Her steps towards making the world lovely and global are endearing but inevitably irritating, and that whole carpe diem attitude rubs off onto 'Bucket List' - "In this lifetime I want you to be mine" - which is all cute but done about 3800 times before, and most of those recent. Sara Tavares (shrug) pops up on the breathy 'The Most Beautiful Thing' which at last resurrects some sense of Furtado's folksy, worldly pop with fresh instruments and a generally wonderful outlook on life (I'm aware I'm flipping on the issue of optimistic pop here, but that's rather the affect of music over me).

A touch of club music resurfaces on 'Waiting for the Night' - the hook sounds a little like PPK's Resurrection - and whilst inevitable it at least has the courtesy to grab the dancefloor with gusto. An unfaltering dance song, really. Rhyming "body and soul" with "losing control" should give you some indication of the nature of 'Miracles', the album's slow and sensual groove with a pretty nice beat but little else, but it's at least a world above the frankly dull 'Circles' and even worse 'Enemy'. Ending an album with a song called 'Believers (Arab Spring)' is certainly a bold move but steers a little on the respectable side of pop culture references (the title conjures images of hand-holding and UNITE banners but it's really more of a power-pop tune).

I suppose my score for this album is borne out of sympathy for the commercial failure of this record and the continued affection for Furtado. Granted, this fails to match up to Folklore or Loose, and will never match the sales or impact of the vastly overrated debut Whoa, Nelly!, but with an artistic vision far more wide and interesting than the likes of Katy Perry, Ke$ha or Britney Spears I'm a little bit put out with her lack of success here: T.S.I. is a fine pop album.

Rating: 6.5/10
Highlights: Big Hoops, The Most Beautiful Thing, Spirit Indestructible, Waiting for the Night
Avoid: Bucket List, Parking Lot, Circles, Enemy

Artwork Watch: Not exactly going to stand out on the shelves is it? [/believing pop music to still be a physical sale]
COMEBACK FACTOR: 5/10 (I saw her once on This Morning. Ouch.)
Up next: Skunk Anansie