Brown largely ignores the elephant in the room, churning out punchy dance-pop songs full of club-ready beats and Casanova gestures. He gloats about’cars and girls and cribs.”He promised ecstasy (” Gonna Make You blossom like a flower,”he tells the girl in the”Take My Time”). There is also a lost-love ballads, delivered by Brown in his nasal voice faded one. But as unfair as it sounds, the incident Rihanna has made it impossible to hear him in the same manner, the sweetness of animated songs as the 2008’s”Forever”is now difficult to sell.

With Rihanna, has been singing never been in doubt. The question has always been personality: Is there a flesh and blood woman who lurks beneath the great voice and see the model? OnR-rated, She answered the question emphatically. There are a couple of engaging Uptempo tunes. (The Stargate-produced’Rude Boy’ is smutty fun with a Caribbean bounce.) But this is an album with a hideous theme: love gone horribly wrong.”What you did to me was a crime,”Rihanna sings in slowly boiling”Cold Case Love.”Elsewhere, she is bent on revenge.”I lick the gun when I’is ready,”she cries in the”G4L,”\ “because I know that revenge is sweet.”The songs are etched in dark shades and minor chords, with Rihanna conveyor of synths and booming beats. The results are a musical match for the black-on-black CD cover – Goth R & B.

No single track approaches greatness Rihanna’s 2007 megahit,”Umbrella.”But even the most widespread Power Ballads here has an intimate quality. In the complainant’Stupid in Love,”Rihanna turns blame inward.”My new nickname is”You Idiot’… / That’s what my friends call me when they see me yelling at my phone.”Such introspection is apparently beyond Brown. On”Lucky Me,”he turns his troubles at a time for complacency:”Even if my world’s Falling Down / I’m still wearing a smile.”A simple I could have done a better track – or at least Brown did a better guy.