Nelly Furtado - Loose

Genre pop Publisher Geffen External Links Official Nelly Furtado Website Official Geffen Records Website

The joy of the summer was the rebounding of Nelly Furtado. After falling off with Folklore, Furtado crashed back onto the charts with a vengeance, delivering "Promiscuous," the pre-eminent single for top-down driving and swimming pool extravagance (Fergie's "London Bridge" and Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" were close seconds, but more on them soon). The song, which featured hit maker extraordinaire Timbaland, was joyous, infectious as well as representing the best that pop has to offer.

Her newest single, "Maneater," which many thought would be too "European" for American tastes is burning up the charts as we speak, and the rest of the tracks on Furtado's Loose have a damn good shot of being released as singles, too.

With nary a misstep, Furtado finds wiggle room to enter back into chart relevance and grabbed hold of a new generation of listeners in the process. Her sense of fun and child-like energy is hard to ignore. Despite the griping by some critics who say that Furtado traded in her smarts for booty-shakin', she hasn't made a stupid or crass album. This is smart, fun pop music, the sort that should be successful. I say that the woman has the ability to do it all and if the success of Loose affords her an offbeat project to flex herself on, it's more than worth any so-called "slumming."