Ciara Harris: Back to basics

These days, an air of desperation seems to hang over Ciara Harris. For an all-too-brief period in the mid-2000s, she was R&B's golden girl. Riding the popularity of Southern crunk music to multi-platinum sales, her equal measures of come-hither allure and tomboy attitude proved a winning combination.

Since then, while the wheels may not have stopped turning altogether, they are definitely spinning slower. Mired in diminishing commercial returns and botched promotional campaigns, it is easy to imagine her despondency as she sits by watching the likes of Rihanna and Beyoncé steam imperiously ahead. Ironically, though, Ciara's tightrope-walk between making the most of her natural gifts and bending to the whims of marketplace has allowed her to stand out as a distinct figure with limited, but singular talents - talents that just happen to be rather badly suited to the current era of brashly Auto-Tuned, Jersey Shore party pop.

Like 2009's Fantasy Ride, Ciara's third album has had something of a tortuous gestation - originally scheduled for a summer release, the mere emergence of Basic Instinct is in itself a small triumph. Following the failure of its predecessor to break her to pop audiences, this release has been trailed as a harder-edged return to her street-level origins. To a large degree, it delivers on this promise. In a reversal of R&B's usual aspirational status anxiety, Ciara continually emphasises her hood credentials and her hometown connections to Atlanta, Georgia. "I'm back up in the trap - shawty, gimme that!" she snarls on the opening title track. In some ways, it's an admission of defeat: a realisation that she will never ascend to the dizzy heights of superstardom, will never float above the rest of the world on the clouds of glamour inhabited by her more successful contemporaries. Just as well, then, that this retrenchment plays so perfectly to her strengths.

To best understand Ciara's music, it's important to know that she trained first as a dancer, not a singer. This is how she approaches her songs: her voice has a limited range, but possesses an elasticity that mirrors her limber moves. At times she is more of an athlete than a singer, bending her voice to the beats, responding to their motion. Gimmie Dat is a prime example: a blistering club banger, it is less a pop song than a workout. Marked by quicksilver suppleness and military precision, then leavened by a perfectly judged sprinkling of Afropop chants, it is a textbook example of how just keeping up with Ciara can be a breathless experience. (Of course, she turns this on its head for the Urban Bass Remix, which can be heard on her YouTube channel - an unbearably pretty trifle, a love letter to street dance.)

When details of Basic Instinct began to emerge earlier in 2009, much was made of the Atlanta super-producer Terius "The-Dream" Nash's involvement. The writer of Rihanna's Umbrella and Beyoncé's Single Ladies, Nash was rumoured to be helming the entire project, but has ended up with credits on just seven of its 11 songs. As a result, unlike his work on Mariah Carey's introspective Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel and the girl group Electrik Red's ferocious How To Be A Lady: Vol 1 last year, Basic Instinct is not a cohesive Dream vision. Yet his touch is still keenly felt. Synths rise like steam from on the opulently carnal Ride; Speechless is a delectable confection of devotion.

In his solo work, Nash has sung about striving for "that other level, beyond that other level"; a place where the synthesis of sonic ideas and pure feeling is so powerful as to overwhelm the listener. Basic Instinct reaches this point in two astonishing final cuts, which find Ciara - having already trumpeted her "attitude" for the whole album - stamping her authority as firmly on her work as she ever has.

Wants For Dinner is a feline prowl on which she taunts a rival with all the confidence of a woman who knows the fight is already won. "My love is built out of bricks/And your love is built out of sticks," she gasps. Meanwhile, the closing I Run It is a gently brewing epic that harks back to 2006's Promise - the pinnacle of Ciara's career and a sparkling high point for R&B in general. Multilayered vocals create a soft bed and evolve into a tactile cocoon-like ballad on which Ciara starts off with what seems like the most natural metaphor for transcendent physical pleasure: her own voice. "I'mma get on your stage and sing like a bird," she coos, but by the second verse it's clear that her sights are set on altogether loftier planes: "Lift off into the sky and exit earth."

It is rare that one can call an R&B album too brief, but if Basic Instinct has any serious flaws, this is one of them. As with Fantasy Ride, many songs were leaked prior to its release. The quality of tracks such as Blauw - filled with confrontational power-play and innuendo - and the skittery, percussive Shut 'Em Up is such that their absence from the final track listing feels like a wasted opportunity.

One of the highlights of Ciara's output in 2010, though, is an indicator of the kind of esteem in which, despite her ongoing commercial failures, she has come to be held. Last year Nguzunguzu, an LA-based production duo who were chosen as MIA's most recent tour DJs, took it upon themselves to remix her cover of Chris Brown's Deuces. This unofficial rework of another unofficial rework is underpinned by a foundation of interlaced vocal snippets and a devastating, yet coolly understated sense of emotion: "You'll never find another girl who'll love you like C, touch you like C - too bad that you couldn't even see," she sighs.

It is fitting that someone like Ciara should become a touchstone for young producers. No matter how often she tries to second-guess both herself and the changing tides of public opinion, she remains an artist whose strengths appear more intuitive than rational. Throughout a career frequently defined by missteps, she keeps stumbling upon moments of magic. Entirely appropriate, then, that while Basic Instinct may initially have been conceived as a vehicle to reassert where her roots are, its music so clearly reveals where her heart is, too.

Alex Macpherson is a regular contributor to The Review. His work can be found in The Guardian and New Statesman.