album reviewed: ashlee simpson//bittersweet world

GRADE:OOOO
Hey. Hazim Here...again. Her last two albums sucked...hard. I was never a fan of her nasally vocal delivery or her 'woe-is-moi' attitude. Here, the emo-ness is stillpresent, but very much downplayed, making Bittersweet World her best and only good album to date.
WHAT'S GOOD: You can slap all kinds of labels on Jessica's younger sister. Trashy pop tart. Nose job junkie. Whiny ungrateful millionaire. All these would be spot on. It's the shameless negative attributes that draws people to reading about her latest exploits in the tabloids. Here, instead of trying to pretend she's normal 'just-like-us', she cranks up the trashiness we all know she exudes. And by doing that, this album excels. Timbalnd and Pharell do great work on her. Like plastic surgeons, they alter the outside, but the inside's still the same. The new wavey first single "Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya)" sees her crank and snap at haters with a pouty lip. It's annoying, but it's catchy. Like the rest of the album, you can hate her but you can't get her out of your head, especially when she cops Gwen so evenly on the reggae-infected "Ragdoll" or the shallow nonsensical "Murder" in which she demands that you get a monkey off her back (?).
WHAT'S NOT SO GOOD: Ashlee never had a voice for proper singing, so when she tries too hard on ballads, you sorta cringe listening to her struggle even through synthesizers and Pro-Tools. Maybe her Gwen-copping addiction led her to try and reinvent Gwen Stefani's sweeping masterpiece of a ballad "Early Winter", through her own "Never Dream Alone", but unsurprisingly, she falters.
GRADE:A-. True, she has an identity crisis, trying to mask the emptyness with different personas. But when that emptyness gets the spotlight (the loping sytnh-embedded "Boys"), her superstar only-money-can-buy producers make sure they fill it with 80s pop vibe goodness. Bittersweet World is really just junk food, but at its best, it's actually really good junk food.
SONG YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO: "Boys", "Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya)"
ARTIST WEBSITE:http://www.ashleesimpsonmusic.com