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| Republic | discogs.com |
Pop stars the world over face undue attention in every area of their lives. Such scrutiny over their most private and irrelevant affairs is immaterial. What matters is their output. What matters is the projects they choose to share with the world. Ariana Grande has in fact done all that is required of her — she has released a very good album.
Slick and polished, it consists of easily digestible synth nuggets interspersed with jazzier influences, bound together with an intangible feeling of direction. Her voice is one of many minor celestial bodies orbiting the luminous star of Céline Dion — thin, but supple and agile, and capable of fairly flashy pyrotechnics.
Dangerous Woman is evidently her most confident and coherent album yet, as well as her most refined. It arrives on the heels of two uneven earlier releases wherein Grande tackled everything and the kitchen sink — sappy Disney-lite balladry, swaggery anthems, Aguileresque torch songs and of course saccharine filler rejected from an X Factor winner's debut. But here she has found a niche for herself, and a flattering one at that.
Newfound confidence notwithstanding, Ariana's incessant insistence that she is some threatening personage not to be trifled with rings more than a little hollow. But a kick of personality, however implausible, sets her miles ahead of her contemporaries.