After the post-Chris Browne trauma of Rated R and the S&M obsessed Loud, it’s a relief to slap on a Rihanna album that’s just a fucking Rihanna album. Her sixth LP in seven years, Talk That Talk sees RiRi stepping breezily between genres, from the xx sampling electro-funk of ‘Drunk On Love’ tthrough the title track’s hi-NRG hip hop (Jay-Z pops up to helpfully note that he is able to “Fly to Ibiza/ Just to get some Pizza”) to the banging ‘Where Have You Been’. The lead single ‘We Found Love’ you will already be familiar with, if only because it was while filming the video in a Co. Down barley field that Rihanna was ordered to put some clothes on by outraged DUP farmer. Occasionally, it’s true, her potty-mouthedness lurches towards self-parody, such as on ‘Birthday Cake’, where she seems to be inviting a love interest to smear her in marzipan and do something unpleasant to her with a dildo (how seriously can we take a song that opens with the choice observation, “I want to fuck your right now”).
But such moments feel like aberrations on a record where the mood is blissed-out, occasionally euphoric and RiRi the trainee porn star rarely gets a look-in. Even the show-stopper ballad, ‘We All Want Love’ (which almost but doesn’t quite sample the intro from Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Under the Bridge’), is celebratory rather than bombastically maudlin, the default emotional setting for pop divas in lung-buster mode recently.