Rihanna Good Girl Gone Bad : C-

It's a good thing Rihanna's pretty, because based on her lyrical performance in Good Girl Gone Bad, she doesn't sound like she'd be much to talk to. The Barbados-born beauty's third album contains more cheesy similes than a middle-school poetry class. Two tracks in, Rihanna sings about a male suitor: "Got so much flavor / like you're the perfect mint."\nBut what Good Girl lacks in brains, it makes up for in dance-floor brawn. The relaxed-but-bouncy first single "Umbrella" is easily Good Girl's strongest track, despite a phoned-in verse from Jay-Z. "Push Up on Me" and "Don't Stop the Music," which quotes the "ma-ma-say ma-ma-saw" chant from Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin," are the most club-friendly.\nLike Rihanna's 2006 hit "S.O.S.," a danceable take on Soft Cell's "Tainted Love," Good Girl's "Shut Up and Drive" borrows its melody from an '80s classic, this time New Order's "Blue Monday." Unfortunately, the guitar-drenched track also includes more dumb car puns than R. Kelly's "Ignition." It's here, at around the fifth track, that Good Girl starts to run out of gas.\nThe forgettable ballads that make up the album's second half include the same idiotic lyricism as Good Girl's first half without the beats to back it up -- or mask it. The highlight is the Timbaland-produced "Let Me Get That," which harkens back to the reggae grooves of past albums. The worst is the sleep-inducing guitar ballad "Rehab," written by Justin Timberlake, whose sweetness is undermined by a chorus that's almost too dumb to be true. \nNo one expected Good Girl to be more than a collection of mindless dance-floor jams, and at least for the first five tracks, it lives up to expectations. Unfortunately, the album's second half is just mindless.