Ciara: Ciara – review

One of the most heartening moments on Ciara's fifth album comes when Nicki Minaj – with whom the R&B singer has built up a welcome chemistry of late, with three superb collaborations during the past year – devotes half her guest rap on Livin' It Up to affirming her partner's greatness. It's a sisterly riposte to Ciara's name having become a byword for commercial failure, which is a reflection less of her talent than of mismanagement and fickle pop trends. In fact, Ciara has quietly built up a formidable discography, and this eponymous set maintains the high quality. It finds Ciara at her most tender (the reverie of DUI; the voluptuous, My Boo-sampling Body Party) and authoritative (Keep on Lookin', a taunting repudiation of the male gaze; the hedonism-as-vengeance anthem I'm Out). At times she's both, as on the hypnotic, organ-underpinned Sophomore and the magnificent Super Turnt Up, on which she coos prettily over twinkling synths before contorting her delivery into a ferocious screwface. The infinitely more successful Rihanna has occasionally mocked her underperforming rival; in light of their recent artistic output, it's hard not to feel that in a more just parallel universe, their careers would be exchanged.