Nelly Furtado’s past decade splits nicely into two halves: a winsome folk-pop starlet amid a cluster of similar folkies, turned Timbaland collaborator amid a cluster of those. It’s hard to talk about Furtado’s career without mentioning her impressive reinvention. Furtado’s a stylistic chameleon, able to adopt almost any style and do it as well or better. “I’m Like a Bird” and “Turn Off the Light” had an exuberance lacking from the anodyne soft-rock and dreary nu-grunge alongside her on the radio. And 2006’s Loose—foreshadowed by a preternaturally assured verse on a Missy Elliott remix—distinguished itself on nearly every single, even with its clichéd good-girl-gone-bad narrative tread by countless pop stars before and after.
Furtado’s 2010s, however, have so far been one attempt after another to recapture 2012’s The Spirit Indestructible and its standouts, such as the M.I.A.-alike “Parking Lot.” But the overall pop audience hasn’t bitten. Enter plan B: going independent, getting metaphorical with Dev Hynes about the Large Hadron Collider, joining Merrill Garbus for a color-guard show, releasing a series of spacey singles. There’s a certain inevitability to this. As pop radio grows more and more hostile to female singer-songwriters and is as hostile as ever to older artists—and as Timbaland has torpedoed the relevance of his sound via a succession of bad tracks—virtually all of Furtado’s peers are going this route. Vanessa Carlton released an art-pop record with aspirations closer to Regina Spektor than Rachel Platten; Michelle Branch cut an album with Patrick Carney. Furtado’s now working with St. Vincent’s producer John Congleton. As always, this causes a little confusion. The line between mainstream and alternative pop blurs more and more by the month—but this reality tends to let albums slip off both radars.
Thankfully, Furtado’s vibrancy elevates The Ride from the rote affair it could have been. Her flexibility is an asset as she attempts many styles. “Cold Hard Truth” and “Right Road” have the bassy strut swagger of St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness”—the former with call-and-response interludes, the latter with a distorted guitar line. “Sticks and Stones” has M83’s arena synth-rock in its blueprint; “Pipe Dreams” channels Dev Hynes’ gossamer R&B; “Carnival Games” and “Phoenix” are piano ballads. “Paris Sun”—to shockingly good effect—recalls Goldfrapp at their steeliest. (Given that Alison Goldfrapp’s career has followed a near-identical trajectory to Furtado’s, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.)
The Ride’s primary flaw is apparent in its mere titles. Too much of the record, particularly the ballads, falls into the songwriter’s trap of taking a conceit and writing every last bit of subtext out of it. (Most egregiously, as The Ride is a comeback record of sorts, is the right-on-cue closing ballad about a phoenix, executed with all the quiet assuredness of a track that’s already been done dozens of times.) Sometimes this isn’t entirely Furtado’s fault. “Tap Dancing,” written with Nashville songwriters Natalie Hemby and Liz Rose—best known for working with Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift, respectively—strives like so many other Nashville portfolio pieces to stretch a figure of speech out to four minutes. And without the twang a country artist would give it, those four minutes are pretty bland.
Even these tracks, though, are redeemed by Furtado’s spirit indestructible. She tears into every song with indomitable energy, and usually has production to match. Though it doesn’t quite mesh with the ballad, the twitchy percussion of “Carnival Games” at least livens things up. Where similar tracks might coast on their heroic synth riff, “Sticks and Stones” pushes the arrangement to a crescendo that sounds actually thrilling. And “Flatline” is a subversion in the Swedish pop style: one loud chorus, complete with snare-drum fireworks and “Two Weeks” piano pep, set to the line “I don’t feel nothing at all”—the song equivalent of a Hyperbole and a Half cartoon. For the album’s graphic emblem, Furtado settled on sunflowers with swords, a symbol of how, she told Billboard, “life when it is at its most beautiful is at its most painful.” Like Furtado’s best work, the peaks of The Ride capture the same.
