Miley Cyrus - Breakout
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Miley Cyrus promised her new album would be more grown-up — it's the kind of talk that sets off alarm bells when you're a 15-year-old tween idol coming off a controversial, bare-backed Vanity Fair photo shoot. She's already got a raspy, middle-aged rocker chick's voice; would she suddenly try to live up to it with more provocative material? A clue to the answer comes in Breakout's opening verse, a harangue against life's cruelest inequities: ''Every week's the same/Stuck in school's so lame/My parents say that I'm lazy/Getting up at 8 a.m.'s crazy/Tired of bein' told what to do/So unfair, so uncool.'' With that, a sigh of parental relief is heard across the land: Our little girl isn't growing up. Phew.
Actually, Cyrus did just the right amount of maturing with her last CD,
Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus, a step up from the wish-fulfillment anthems of Disney's Hannah Montana into guitar-fueled, boy-crazy power pop. This successor mostly follows the same templates, tossing in a Go-Go's influence for good measure (drummer Gina Schock even co-wrote and sings on the ''Vacation''-esque title track). Breakout's best tunes let Cyrus be feisty without graduating to Avril-like levels of petulance: ''Full Circle,'' ''The Driveway,'' and the single ''7 Things,'' which veers from sensitive breakup song in the strummy verses to punky-pop kiss-off in the double-time choruses. Here, her demands for repentance are amusingly age-appropriate: ''Your sincere apology...when you mean it, I'll believe it/If you text it, I'll delete it.'' U go, grl.
After all this fun, Breakout's second half gets overly ballad-heavy — guess that's where the growing up factors in — although, impressively, she's a dead ringer for the Dixie Chicks' Natalie...
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