It was never reviewed on here but I can say that I wasn’t fond of Ashley Tisdale‘s first album. Now she however released a new album titled Guilty Pleasure and that is getting a review. Ashley is one of the few Disney stars who isn’t actually signed to Disney for her music, she’s with Warner Music. The CD came out a couple of days ago so the review is a bit late, plenty of people who don’t buy a CD in its first week though.
I don’t know what the depth of her involvement is but she was involved with writing some of the songs. The bulk of the album was still written by other people but at least she is involved with it to some extent. With 49 minutes and 35 seconds it’s actually “long” for the demographic, most CD’s tend to be shorter than that.
Best way to to describe the genre of the album is straight and simple pop, while on her first album she tried to throw a little R&B in there she kept (almost) away from that this time. What I am not sure of is what kind of demographic this album is meant for exactly? The strange thing is that in song she sings about rebelling against her parents and in the next song she talks about getting tattoos.
Music is also meant for people to express emotion, feelings, ideas, all sorts of things. You never really get the feeling that there was any real thought put into that on this album, the themes of the songs are just a bit too random. It’s just a collection of songs recording by the same artist. Now lets get to those songs though.
What’s good and bad? Lets start with the bad part, I can’t really say that there are horrible tracks on it. Two songs that don’t really fit however are Hair and Crank It Up. Some people will like them but to me they feel like they shouldn’t be on there. One thing that can be said about most of the songs is that it’s just a bit too overproduced. The voice of an artist is the main part of their music, when that part is pushed into the background there is just something lacking. That the music mostly comes from a computer doesn’t help it, a computer should be a tool to make better music. Not a replacement for instruments (unless it’s electronic music of course). I have to make one note about How To Love Someone though, far too dramatic music wise.
Now to the good stuff, lets just pick the songs that really stand out. I would name the best tracks It’s Alright, It’s OK (the first single), Erase and Rewind and Switch. Just uncomplicated pop songs with sometimes a tiny little bit of rock thrown in. That’s probably the best way to describe most of Ashley’s album, just uncomplicated. It is what it is and doesn’t pretend to be more than an average pop album.
So now to a verdict, as I said it’s just an average uncomplicated pop album. So it would be a quite alright album, for a sixteen year old. Thing is that Ashley is 24 and I don’t want a 24 year old to be singing about teen rebellion, just seems out of place. It really isn’t music that you would skip if you had it on your playlist but I just can’t give it a high rating for the earlier mentioned reasons. So I have to keep it at two out of five, even though it seems very low, compared to other things I just can’t rate it higher.
Tags: Ashley Tisdale
