…In which we declare Nelly Furtado a NorthKoreanLibyan despotic dictator with PINCHED VOCAL CHORDS…

[Video][Website]
[4.40]

Katherine St Asaph: Forget Timbaland; it’s starting to look like Nelly’s the one who lost more mojo. The snippetized freestyle part’s fine, but who signed off on the chintzy synth-harpsichord ballad? Why is she singing like someone’s pinching her throat? Is she even trying to chart anymore?
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: It’s almost as though she’s singlehandedly trying to keep the dream of 1999-2006 alive. It’s a shame that pop is so much less omnivorous these days.
[6]

Pete Baran: Unfortunately I don’t have a co-writer credit to hand, but it strikes me as exactly the kind of song you might write in the downtime of a private gig for Gadhafi. He certainly believed he had a spirit indestructible, until it was destructed by his angry people. Now I am not saying that in their brief acquaintance that they wrote a song together, or that Nelly has decided to record a song from her “pal” Gadhafi’s point of view. I just think that if Nelly and Muammar were to write a song together, it would almost certainly sound like this. And who knew despots were able to put together a half-decent pop song?
[5]

Alfred Soto: Much closer to K-pop than the K-pop we’ve reviewed lately: North Korean pop, that is. The pipsqueaked singer mouths survivalist agitprop while martial drums do their best to keep starving citizens conscious on the parade grounds.  
[3]

Brad Shoup: Is Alanis ghostwriting titles now?
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: In which Nelly Furtado attempts to revive the heartfelt subject matter of her early 2000’s music with the perpetual-girls-night-out vibe of Loose, which also happened to sell really well. The production, courtesy of Darkchild, does a good job of balancing these two personas. The drums sound huge when they need to, and Darkchild fits in stretches of space meant to showcase Furtado’s vocal chops. Still, he finds room for disco lasers. Like on her last single “Big Hoops (The Bigger The Better),” Furtado tries to stretch herself into pop-diva form on “Spirit Indestructible,” with mixed results. Her vocals are a touch too nasally to be as commanding as, say, Rihanna. Still, she makes the climax of this song work, synthesizing with the drama of Darkchild’s sound.
[6]

Will Adams: The schmaltzy harpsichord intro must be some penance for the awesome freestyle that follows it, but since it comes first, it feels like cruel and unusual punishment. I’m usually too grouchy to go for anything as inspirational as this, especially with its awkward phrasings, but its toughness makes Nelly’s claim that much more convincing. Like “Big Hoops,” the instrumental ending is the best part, soaking you in the booming beats and a blizzard of stuttered vocalizing which, per the lyric video, is actually “A-E-I-O-U.” And anything that reminds me of Sesame Street is A-E-I-OK with me.
[6]

Michaela Drapes: As a diehard Nelly Furtado apologist, I find it hard to defend her in this high chipmunk mode — her manipulated voice strains just too far out of range for comfort. Her terrible, nasal enunciation is also worse than usual, too. Add that to the boringly kaleidoscopic chittering beats littered throughout and the misplaced breakdown, and it’s just a nonsensical mess.
[3]

Anthony Easton: This is oddly anonymous, with Furtado’s voice manipulated beyond identification. And she has a pretty distinct voice — what is the purpose of doing such damage to it?
[4]

Jer Fairall: In the summer of 1999, I saw Nelly Furtado perform an opening set (for the wonderful Emm Gryner, whose too-obscure name I will never miss an opportunity to drop) in a now-defunct local dive, accompanied by only an acoustic guitar player. She performed a jangly early version of “Hey Man” captivating enough that when I heard Woah, Nelly! playing in HMV a year-and-a-half later it registered with a great shock of recognition. If she performed any of her other future hits that night, I had already forgotten them by the time “I’m Like a Bird” and “Turn Off The Lights” had their turn at fleeting commercial ubiquity. What I mostly remember about that performance, aside from one shimmering folk-pop gem, is a singer doing her best to show off her rather average pipes, stretching too many vowels and lines to their melismatic limits in a way that, I see now, unattractively anticipated the American Idolization of pop a few years later. I mention this anecdote here because, thirteen years later, Furtado seems to still be fighting a war between pop pleasure and perceived notions of good taste, drowning a production that stumbles to locate itself somewhere between pulsing anthemic deliverance and a playful melange of hip-hop and pop poses, in so much well-meaning sap. Add to all of this a sense of penance being done for those Timbaland hits (the kind of thing that can lead the guilty conscience to record an all Spanish record as a followup) and what you get is the worst kind of middling: pop that’s neither all that pleasurable nor all that meaningful.  
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