Such a weird album. Ciara's never exactly been an album artist, but her last two records had album tracks that were good for at least a few moments of dizzy slow-burn pop ecstasy, her languid robotic coo curling itself around expertly futuristic tracks from whatever producer was on fire that year. Ciara's main gift was the way her soft, tiny voice would disappear into the track, turning itself into just one working part in a beautiful, gleaming machine. It's not that she didn't have personality; there's a certain sweet-hearted down-home snap to singles like "Goodies" and "Oh", and the take-no-shit force of those songs made the heart-stopping ballad "Promise" sound that much more sweet and tender. But her brilliance has always been in interpretation, in selling a pop producer's furthest-out future-pop ideas and turning them into expert summertime pop. And it's that malleability that made her seem something like a new Janet Jackson, complete with headset mic.
Except in the lead-up to Fantasy Ride, she's come off more like circa-'09 Janet, thrashing around desperately for a hit single and facing interminable album-release pushbacks. Fantasy Ride went through two failed singles (the first of which, the T-Pain collab "Go Girl", doesn't even appear on the album) before the unimaginative but okay "Love Sex Magic" finally got her the radio foothold that had been hers to lose a couple of years ago. "Love Sex Magic" is really just a bargain-basement Justin Timberlake track, the sort of thing he could've had lying around in a closet somewhere nearly three years after FutureSex/LoveSounds. It's not bad, exactly; I like the elastic disco bounce. But it's lazy, and Timberlake's nerdy swagger really highlights Ciara's total lack of presence. That's a problem that comes up over and over on the album.
The big issue here is one of desperation. Every song clearly longs to be a hit. She's enlisted an absolute murderers' row of producers: Polow, Danja, The-Dream/Tricky Stewart. All of these people seem like they should be able to work magic with Ciara, but somehow, the songs just aren't there. The-Dream and Tricky Stewart tend to fill their tracks with empty spaces, and Ciara's voice needs hall-of-mirrors production to really register, so slight, minimal tracks like "Ciara to the Stage" and "Like a Surgeon" leave her sounding stranded. "Pucker Up" has a flat, tinny club-pop beat from Rodney Jerkins (still alive!) and lots of talk about Ciara's swag, a concept that even she does not seem to quite get. The Timberlake co-written "G is for Girl (A-Z)" has an unbelievably goofy alphabetical-slaughter lyrical conceit. "Turntables" has a really good moment where it switches abruptly from crispy electro to EQed-out bloghouse, but the impact is sort of blunted by the presence of Chris Brown. And it's not like Brown does anything particularly egregious on the song, but, I mean, this guy just famously (OK, allegedly) mashed out his pop-star girlfriend on Grammy night. Why would you invite him onto your album for his first post-abuse appearance? Do you need a hit that badly?
"1, 2 Step", Ciara's second hit, was breezy little roller-rink electro jam, and one of the best things about it was how effortless it sounded. And now Ciara's thrashing around looking for a single, and somehow, it shows. And yet that almost manic obsession with crossover love leads Fantasy Ride to some great, fascinating places. "High Price", in a lot of ways, is a straight-up "Oh" retool (right down to the great, stuttery Ludacris guest-verse), except Ciara, for no apparent reason, sings it in this histrionic opera voice, which lends her shit-talk lyrics a hallucinatory power: "See me in the drop, head fresh up out the hair salon/ Booty look softer than a McDonald's hamburger bun." (Those aren't even soft!) "Never Ever" takes a big chunk of its chorus from a song I never could stand, the Philly soul staple "If You Don't Know Me By Now", and surrounds it with dizzily great Polow da Don production flourishes and a typically superb Young Jeezy guest-verse, somehow rendering its source material tolerable in the process. "I Don't Remember" is a sweaty, uncomfortable heartbroken hangover song, with whooshing Euro-trance keyboards that feel so totally wrong that they sort of work.
So that's what you get with Fantasy Ride: A few brilliant left turns that feel almost accidental mixed in with a sort of end-times hunger for a top-40 audience that doesn't seem to exist anymore. As a vivid little snapshot of what's happened to the pop music business, it's fascinating. But it's not much of an album.
