Rihanna - Loud

It has been a while since I've heard most of the songs on this album, but the singles' omnipresence in the charts makes them hard to avoid. It serves appropriately that they are among the lowest quality on the album, (this is the first three at least, the 4th one seems to be one of the better tracks on the album).

I should start by saying that I've never been a fan. This will most likely not change over time, but I should acknowledge this just to be fair to anyone who questions my review score. Being a non-fan, it means that I never have high expectations, and thus can't ever be disappointed with what I get. That being said, the hype surrounding the first single, "Only Girl (In the World)" made it seem to have potential. Unfortunately this was met without reasonable explanation, as I found the song unappealing, with its bizarre concept and horrid vocals. Naturally it was a massive hit. This was followed by yet another mediocre song in "What's My Name" that continued all the things that were wrong with the previous single. I tired of it quickly and it was not remedied by numerous people insisting that it was a brilliant. Sure, they're fine to think that, but I just don't see it. Somewhere in the middle of this, I began to hear some of the album tracks. They ranged from the listenable yet average to the horrific. A general outlying problem I had was the vocals. The idea that we have singers that cannot sing truly baffles and worries me. It's a worrying sign for the future of popular music, which I admittedly can live with now, but in the future I'll have to deal with an increasing volume of opinions that some of this music is classic. It may be an upstep from whatever horrible state it ends up to be by then, but bad music is still bad music. This paragraph has been going for too long, I should probably start a new one.

There that's better. There's nothing uglier than ill thought out paragraph sizing. There's also probably nothing more irrelevant than talking about the consistency of the length of paragraphs when I'm supposed to be talking about music. I shall resume that. S&M is baaaaaaaaaaaaad. I mean really bad. There's so many things wrong with it that I don't know where to begin. Fortunately I've already reviewed it and it's probably best to see that for my collective thoughts on it.

As for another point I've hammered, release timing! One thing that ruins a lot of artists when releasing their (usually second) album is taking insufficient time after the previous album to do so, which results in a rushed album and quality suffers. This album was released approximately 12 months after the previous one, and based on what I know from that album so far, it definitely shows in this. There are no real ideas here, just a bunch of tracks slapped together and packaged and sold. The real kicker here is the inclusion of a continuation of an already massively popular song in "Love the Way You Lie". What this does is lure fans of that in just to get that one song, a strategy that angered many iTunes reviewers when they made it impossible to buy the song on its own in the US iTunes store. Sure, I don't ask albums to be a cohesive effort, but it's when something as egregious as that occurs that I start to question things.

To conclude, I found this to be subpar as both a collection of songs and as an album on the whole. A big disappointment as I occasionally find pop albums to be better than the singles suggest.