Music

Consider this for a moment. This album arrives on Beyoncé’s twenty-fifth birthday. Since she decided to take a break from Destiny’s Child in 2001, she’s appeared in several films, launched a clothing line and, with producer Rich Harrison, recorded ‘Crazy In Love’, one of the defining singles of the decade so far. She’s been busy. Apparently, this follow-up to 2003’s ‘Dangerously In Love’ was recorded inside three weeks with Beyoncé so desperate to get back in the studio she cut short her holiday.

And although the gratuitous decadence of a typical Beyoncé holiday probably defies sane imagination, it was worth it. She’s back in cahoots with her customary partners in crime, Harrison, Jay-Z, Swizz Beatz and The Neptunes, and this is yet more of the state-of-the-art modern pop-soul she has helped to pioneer. It’s infectious but deceptively complex, commercial yet unpredictable and joyous but strangely conflicted. ‘B-Day’s’ songs deal with fairly traditional themes, but a layer of intrigue is added by the paranoia that must be an occasional by-product of her success. ‘Going around in a car I bought for you,’ she snarls on ‘Irreplaceable’, ‘don’t you ever get to thinking that you’re irreplaceable.’

‘Upgrade U’ also hints at ambivalence towards bling aspirations. It’s oddly businesslike, seeming to posit a love affair as a business arrangement until Jay-Z interjects, comparing the rock on his lady’s finger to a tumour. It’s this doubt, this acknowledgment of confusion, that makes for such a bracing ride. Well, that and the storming tunes. The magnificent ‘Freakum Dress’, for example, is one long crescendo, welding galloping beats and a steamrolling two-note riff to a vertiginously ascending, multi-tracked vocal celebration of hitting the town and driving the boys crazy.

‘B-Day’ isn’t quite perfect. ‘Resentment’ blusters slightly in its straining for grandeur, and ‘Kitty Kat’ feels slightly anodyne despite its sweetly vicious climax. And there’s nothing that feels quite so unanswerable as ‘Crazy In Love’. But even so, if Beyoncé feels she needs another holiday, she can rest assured that she’s earnt it.