Send "Susan Boyle " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Nytimes |
 Rihanna glares from the cover of “Rated R,” concealing one eye with a hand. “Rated R,” her fourth album, arrives nine months after Chris Brown, her boyfriend at the time, blackened her eye in a beating as they were driving back from a pre-Grammy party. The aftermath — his sentence to community service and a restraining order, her condemnation of domestic violence — has filled the airwaves and Internet.“Rated R” doesn’t specifically address those events, but it hardly ignores them. It’s a bleak, adamant album that’s both brave and skillful. Its love songs are about breakups and passion’s destructive power, leaving listeners to read into them what they will. Meanwhile, in the power-chorded “Rockstar 101,” Rihanna announces, “I never play the victim.” The songs on “Rated R” make the payoffs of being a lover and pop diva sound like compulsions rather than pleasures, with perseverance as its own and only reward. “I need it all: the money, the fame, the cars, the clothes,” Rihanna sings in “Hard,” a warning to would-be rivals that also insists, “No pain is forever — yup, you noticed.”...full text |
| Ew |
| Given the emotional breakdown she reportedly suffered earlier this year, Susan Boyle sounds surprisingly self-assured on I Dreamed a Dream, the YouTube sensation's highly anticipated debut: ''Who I Was Born to Be,'' the only original tune here, is pure showbiz- veteran schmaltz. For fans of Boyle's original Britain's Got Talent clip, the result might be a bit of a letdown, especially in snoozily competent versions of ''Daydream Believer'' and Madonna's ''You'll See,'' which offer none of her jarred-lightning charm. Still, the lady's ''Cry Me a River''does pack a strangely sensual punch — the weird thrill of hearing SuBo get low....full text |
| Boston |
| Along with Adam Lambert of “American Idol,’’ Susan Boyle was 2009’s most famous second-place finisher. Now that the people who couldn’t seem to get their heads around the idea that a middle-age woman who didn’t fit the current standards of beauty could actually have a pretty singing voice have recovered from feeding their YouTube jones, what does Boyle do? She offers up a perfectly innocuous album of church songs, pop covers, Broadway show tunes, and a seasonal number - “Silent Night’’ - that continue to prove that point but little else. There are some lovely vocal performances here and some well-appointed and understated arrangements. But not one of Boyle’s versions transcends the original or adds much of an emotional shading, other than a consistent undercurrent of melancholy that makes the album feel increasingly drab. Boyle manages to turn one of the cheeriest songs in pop music, the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer,’’ into a eulogy with her rainy-day reading. The running theme seems to be pluck and determination, as Boyle tackles Madonna’s living-well-is-the-best-revenge anthem “You’ll See’’ and overcomes a lifetime of discouragement in Patty Griffin’s “Up to the Mountain’’ (curiously shorn of the “MLK Song’’ parenthetical). While it’s laudable that Boyle has overcome her personal tribulations and other people’s assumptions to realize her dream - and in several songs her palpable determination is heartwarming - the rewards here are fairly modest, perhaps befitting the woman producing them. She simply wanted to sing, and now she has, so good for her....full text |
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