Mi Plan (CD)

Cooling her heels while crafting a follow-up to her hot dance makeover Loose, Nelly Furtado released Mi Plan, her first full-length Spanish album, in the fall of 2009. As it turns out, Mi Plan comes much closer to Furtado's previous music than Loose, but she's retained many lessons from her time with Timbaland, giving this a much stronger rhythmic foundation than her first two albums which this otherwise resembles in sound and structure. Nelly still sounds vaguely like a modern hippie, fusing together cultures with a hazily spiritual undertow, something that works well on an album like this, which is pitched at a Latin audience but never feels like a niche throwaway by a superstar. Instead, this is assured and cohesive, holding together better than her muddled sophomore effort Folklore but having a similar range, bouncing elegantly from barbed, alt rock guitars to electro synths to grand, gorgeous ballads. In fact, it says quite a bit about Nelly Furtado's ambitions and skill when her Spanish detour winds up being arguably her strongest album yet. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi