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Published on Monday, Jul 07, 2008
IDENTIFIED
Vanessa Hudgens
While the second installment of High School Musical was extremely successful, that might not be the case for Vanessa Hudgens' second album, Identified.
The follow-up to her gold debut, V, Identified shows Hudgens hasn't really grown musically in the two years since that album's release — her voice remains weak and uninspiring. The CD adds to her problems with subpar material.
''I'm tired of the boys who don't like to dance/And if you don't like to dance you don't stand a chance,'' she sings on the first single, Sneakernight. The song, produced by JR Rotem (Rihanna's SOS, Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls), is sophomoric and tailor-made for the Radio Disney-set. It is also indicative of most of the CD.
Don't Ask Why features Hudgens at her best — a nice voice minus the bubble-gum sound. She sounds clean, clear, and under control.
A few tunes suggest the promise that Identified fails to deliver. The title track is solid, as is First Bad Habit. Amazed, featuring Lil Mama, is arguably the album's best track: The lip-gloss queen and the Disney star may even see a Top-40 hit with this one.
All those songs were produced by Dr. Luke (Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl); Clearly he should have played a bigger role in this CD.
— Mesfin FekaduAssociated Press
LAST 2 WALK
Three 6 Mafia
A couple of years ago it would have been easy to mistake the core members of Three 6 Mafia — Juicy J and DJ Paul — for rap stars. In 2005 they had their first pop hit, the sweeping and sinister Stay Fly, and in 2006 they won the Oscar for best original song, memorably performing It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp, from Hustle & Flow, to an Academy Awards audience that didn't seem quite sure if it was being punk'd: Who were these guys?
But Three 6 Mafia had been making terrific, spooky albums for more than a decade, though it hadn't had much success or recognition outside the South. After the Oscars Three 6 Mafia rode the wave of unlikely fame, excising an ancillary member, Crunchy Black, and moving to California to tape an MTV reality series, the occasionally amusing, more often uncomfortable Adventures in Hollyhood.
On that show, Three 6 Mafia members were routinely portrayed as country folk not quite sure how to cope in the big city. And there is a slight residue of their Hollyhood days here, particularly My Own Way, a dismal team-up with ordinarily antic (but here gloomy) rock band Good Charlotte.
But mostly, and thankfully, the group seems to have forgotten its brush with the limelight. Which is to say Last 2 Walk, its first album since the excellent Most Known Unknown, from 2005, sounds like vintage Three 6 Mafia: bruising production, gloriously foul-natured lyrics, single-minded focus on life's pleasures — the humorously lewd I'd Rather and Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body) — all under a cloud of paranoia. ''Play with your Playstation,'' they warn, slightly absurdly, on Playstation, ''Don't play with me, boy.''
And yet, even when Three 6 Mafia menaces, it's exuberant. Over the years it has learned to create minor-key arrangements that bend in curious, exciting ways, seen here on First 48 and On Some Chrome, a collaboration with UGK. (When Pimp C of UGK died in late 2007, he was in Los Angeles collaborating with Three 6 Mafia on tracks for this album.) Given the choices Juicy J and DJ Paul could have made — and for a time, did make — Last 2 Walk feels almost willfully obscure: in other words, right back where they belong.
— Jon Caramanica
New York Times
IDENTIFIED
Vanessa Hudgens
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