Loose is the best and worst pop album of the year, scattershot in every respect, crippling in its inconsistencies, and just a regular pain in the ass if you're the kind of person who values listening to albums all the way through. Which is basically nobody these days-- so Loose is great! Except when it's not. Its post-new wave/slink-funk/pseudo-reggaetón/drippy ballads template signifies a few things, but most especially that Nelly needed a hit badly.
After the failure of her second album, Folklore, an adventurous-if-sappy globo-handjob, Furtado's been paired with rhythmic savant Timbaland and his protégé Danja Handz for all but two songs on Loose. And they've already provided international hits with "Promiscuous" and "Maneater", two doses of buzzbeater bass and clomping hi-hats right out of Tim's standard playbook. The songs fit snugly into Tim's oeuvre, but not Furtado's, who's best known for "I'm Like a Bird" and the manic Tim-produced remix of Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On". They sound unlike Furtado not because they're danceable or sexy-- her first two albums were those things-- but because they're about dancing and fucking.
It's hard to tell who is most responsible for the odd execution of this album, Timbaland, Interscope poobah Jimmy Iovine (as Pitchforker Julianne Shepherd has opined), or Furtado herself. But it's all over the place musically. The two singles come early and are surrounded by the album's other interesting songs, like the Madonna-aping swirler "Glow", which rises and falls under the swell of some stop-start keyboards. After "Glow" is "Showtime", a midtempo ballad that comes so close to Aaliyah's understated grace, vocally and emotionally, it's terrifying. Hearing Furtado-- usually a vocal berserker-- rein things in is gratifying for that moment, even when linked with Danja's Timbo4cheap production.
"No Hay Igual", which has presumably been called reggaetón because it's sung in Spanish and isn't salsa, is an aerial assault. But it never wears down the listener and actually uses a few vocal change-ups, unlike the much-maligned genre it's been compared to. Directly after that, everything goes to hell. With a series of groan-worthy, poorly sung ballads mixed with far inferior grasps at pop, the album fades hard down the stretch. If "Promiscuous" is one of the fiercest songs of lust in recent memory, "In God's Hands" is one of the limpest. It sounds like Paula Cole on Paxil singing Rob Thomas' throwaways. "Our love's floating up in the sky in heaven/ Where it began, back in God's hands". That's the chorus. The Chris Martin-penned "All Good Things (Come to an End)" is less painful, but not by much.
The strangest thing about Loose isn't its irregularity, but the simple fact that this doesn't sound like Nelly Furtado at all. Listening to her first two albums, Furtado developed a bizarre speed-slur in her hooks, one of the most unique singing styles in modern music. She digs melisma, but avoids showing off. It seemed like her voice just couldn't stop doing that bob-and-weave. Here, she coos and caws and crows, but she never lets, um, loose. Even the kinetic singles are sing-rapped or delivered in crisp turns. This makes for a very cold album, fatalistic in its sexiness but soporific in its soul-searching.
There's been much made of Furtado's referencing of NBA MVP Steve Nash and the knowing nod to Hall & Oates, but those are just pop-cult placeholders: Look! She's hip and Canadian! If anything, these feel like the most corporate moves on the record, a kowtowing to which Furtado never seemed to stoop. The only thing that speaks to the proposed offhandedness is the ghastly between-song banter between Furtado, her band, and Timbaland. Rather than the warm, strident girl that once sang, "I don't want ambivalence no more", the crush of sex and power and chart potential has got her chirping, "Move your body around like a nympho." It's not the worst outcome in the world, and as nearly all of Timbaland's music does, it makes you move. But maybe at the expense of a thoughtful songwriter.
