4
3/5
Three years is a long time in an industry with such an insatiable appetite for newness and difference. She may have stopped short of complete reinvention, but from the Raquel Welch styling of the cover shot to the closing notes, Beyoncé has pretty much confounded expectation. With the underwhelming I Am… Sasha Fierce well behind her, one third of the world’s all-conquering pop triad has resisted any temptation to borrow from Lady G’s futuro-disco book, and instead gone out on a pretty idiosyncratic pop limb.
What’s most striking about 4 is that no one genre dominates, and that neither the rumoured duet with Rihanna nor the actual session work with Sleigh Bells appear. This suggests a rethink, and a decision to range far and wide: from ’80s disco-pop to dancehall/bashment, soca, Dirty South-toned hip hop and even diwali song. A raft of producers – Kanye West, The-Dream and Shea Taylor included – have pulled off several cut-and-shut coups. Take ‘Countdown’, which begins as a cheeky splicing of Kanye’s ‘All of the Lights’ with Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’, then pitches into bonkers, eight-bit dancehall with steel pans. Or ‘Run the World (Girls)’, which borrows both Kelis’s creamy R&B and MIA’s global bashment. Terrific, both. As are the bouncy, André 3000-featuring ‘Party’ and ‘Love on Top’, an irresistible homage to Jacko circa Off the Wall.
There are sour notes – the ghastly, synthesized guitar on ‘1 + 1’ and ‘Rather Die Young’, the mawkish synths on a half-formed ‘I Miss You’ and the overwrought, prematurely morbid ‘I Was Here’ – but that’s par for the premier-league pop course. 4 can’t have been an easy record to make. It’s to Beyoncé’s credit that so little of that difficulty shows.
