Friday, July 15th, 2016

Rihanna – Sledgehammer

Free of Sia?


[Video][Website]
[4.75]

Katie Gill: Sia had a song where she did her best Rihanna, now Rihanna has a song where she does her best Sia. I mean, it’s a great song and Riri’s voice blows this song out of the water. But especially since Sia’s an established artist with an established career, it’s really noticeable when she hands off a half-formed “Titanium” copy to someone else. 
[4]

Hannah Jocelyn: With “Sledgehammer,” Rihanna jumps from an underwritten Future outtake to an overproduced Sia outtake. And that says something, considering that Sia literally released an album full of outtakes earlier this year. It’s sad, if anything – Anti didn’t perform that badly, did it? 
[3]

Iain Mew: I hadn’t considered that “Pyramid Song”-via-Sia might be a thing that would ever actually exist, never mind that I would want it to, but trust Rihanna to make the weirdest things happen.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: Eventually Sia’s dogged dependence on extended metaphor will have to be revealed as a metaphor itself. Is it representative of the way people singing her songs often sound like they’re trying to be her analogue? Is there an implicit ranking between all the different hard things she writes about? Could the choice of a sledgehammer relate to its etymological links to “slay”? Too many questions remain unanswered, but this is satisfactorily straightforward: cinematic in such a way that it successfully eschews a chorus, moody, pensive and yet steely. It’s not quite “Russian Roulette,” but it stands strong beside it.
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: Rihanna does her best to traverse this plane that’s full of awkward peaks and valleys. The melody curves rather sharply and high notes shoot up out of nowhere. The song finally softens after the bloated chorus, when she reveals the sledgehammer reference, but it’s disappointingly just an afterthought at that point.
[3]

Adaora Ede: In my traipses through Stan Twitter, I’ve consistently noted one of the fighting points that is consistently thrown at Rihanna’s Navy (particularly from the Beyhive): Rihanna has always lacked the ability to shine her personality through her songs,and therefore, no one really knows who she is musically. I had never thought of that before, but after I read that, it bothered me. So the fun-loving island gyal and the good girl gone bad and the electro pop bombshell- etc etc; you get the point- were never real? In other cases, it would be versatility, but Riri constantly lacks the sentiment to push it for me. Of the flat characters of Rihanna, I prefer the sultry, more rap influenced character that appears in songs like “Bitch Better Had My Money”. So, I was a little glad to hear her slurring the “You’re just another brick and I’m a sledgehammer” chorus. Just a little. While I can get behind an orchestral ballad, “Sledgehammer” is unsuccessful because the idea that Rihanna is nothing more than a dummy steely singing songs TRULY resonates through. The high notes sound like they were copy and pasted from Sia’s guide track.
[4]

Will Adams: One of the most notable victories of Anti was that it seemed Rihanna had finally freed herself from Sia’s songwriting tics. (Put another way, would you rather the lead single have been “Cheap Thrills” instead of “Work”?) “Sledgehammer” has all the same problems of “Diamonds”: Rih being faithful to a guide vocal she has no reason to follow, a bloated, plodding arrangement, and production that mistakes leadenness for gravitas.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Recorded in 2014, apparently — a casualty of album-release holdups, or of Fifth Harmony’s single on this not-all-that-common theme getting out first? Regardless, it’s here now, attached to a Star Trek movie for reasons of “it’s there” and “sure why not.” (I’m a bit miffed no one on the video Googled the combination and learned of the cool concept of NASA sledgehammering the goddamn moon.) “Sledgehammer” is spectacularly obviously a Sia track, for better and worse. For someone so meticulously deliberate about constructing hits to formula (she calls this one “victim to victory”), Sia does remarkably little self-editing. Genuinely distinctive lines make it through, but also hard fails — fruit flies like a crumb, not sparrows, and “a swimming pool of salted crimes” sounds like a synopsis of “Guts.” Yet — damn it, formula — it’s bluntly effective anyway. The smoke that’s gathered in Rihanna’s lower range helps. So does its being “Wrecking Ball” done bigger, smashier and with 50% less nudity.
[5]

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2 Responses to “Rihanna – Sledgehammer”

  1. lest people miss scott’s alt text: “Elastic titanium cannonball diamond. (Dipped in radioactive acid rain perfume, with fire and gasoline. By a wolf.)”

  2. Pretty sure I’ll have missed some.

    Also, unsure why they didn’t go with “salty cries” and not “salted crimes”, because that’s what I thought she was saying even despite it not being what I knew I heard.