Nelly Furtado - Folklore (Bonus Track) (Enh) (CD)

All Music Guide

Unlike some of her modernday neosinger/songwriter peers, Nelly Furtado never hid her ambition or her desire to be an "important" artist, which was part of the charm of her debut, Whoa, Nelly Despite (or perhaps because of) her youth, she was willing to try anything, blending a number of sounds and styles, all of which were tied together by her sincerity and audacious desire to say something grand, or at least say everything grandly. Her musical restlessness was underpinned by a sensibility that was fundamentally serious but leavened by sly humor, all of which made Whoa, Nelly a bracing listen. Her second album, Folklore, is a bit of a different situation. Released three years after her debut, it picks up where the first record leaves off, but it's a much more serious affair, a situation telegraphed by the album covers. Whoa, Nelly and Folklore mirror each other both bear the same Nelly Furtado logo and both feature a reclining Furtado, but where the debut was bright, girlish, and rather innocent, finding her lying to the right in a field, she's now bathed in warm, dark colors, looking rather sultry as she lies to the left among a bunch of leaves. The artwork implies she's more mature, and it's a sentiment that's mirrored in the album titles, since the plainspoken Folklore lacks the humor of Whoa, Nelly and suggests she'd rather play it straight than play around. And that's the problem with Folklore: though it surely has impressive moments, the album is a selfconscious, somber affair that takes itself far too seriously. At this point, Furtado's Achilles' heel is that she doesn't see a world outside herself. While there's a certain truth to the old axiom "write what you know," she, like many of her peers, takes this credo to extremes, believing that every emotional fluctuation she had in the aftermath of her mild stardom can make for a captivating album. While some have made great art from a similar viewpoint, the key is depersonalizing the situation and turning it toward the universal; for instance, on Nirvana's In Utero, Kurt Cobain turned his agony into poetry by alluding to it, not chronicling it, thereby making it resonate to anyone who felt disillusioned and despairing.