Nelly Furtado - Folklore

From time to time, I take a mainstream pop single to heart, and "I'm Like A Bird" was one such when it hit the charts a while back; having dug out the cd single, I see that it was back in 2000...hard to believe that it was so long ago. Anyhow, Folklore was her follow up album - I haven't listened to the first - and veers quite strongly towards the 'global pop' side of things (in that respect, it recalls Arular), but isn't all that interesting. It starts off quite brightly, with banjo and mandolin tinkling away in the first couple of songs and some pleasant sung-chanted tunes, but the album doesn't really take off at any point, and the production is maybe a bit too 'top 40', giving it a glossy, homogeneous feel that doesn't do justice to Furtado's attempts to genre-hop and synthesise.