Despite that slightly apologetic title, the opening lines of Guilty Pleasure suggest it could be - fingers crossed! - a dramatic pop reinvention along the lines of Christina Aguilera's Stripped or Pink's Missundaztood! "Up above the surface I was just a perfect child," Ashley Tisdale sings, "But underneath it all I was craving to be wild." Sadly, the High School Musical star doesn't come good on her promise. Her idea of rebellion, as outlined on a later track called 'Hot Mess', consists of leaving her mail to pile up to the ceiling and parking her car on the drive sideways. Compared to what Britney's been up to in recent years, this seems about as wild as a Tupperware party.
However, Tisdale does use Guilty Pleasure to distance herself from her pink 'n' perky High School Musical persona. The album cover sees her sport newly-brunette hair, heavy eye make-up and an outfit that could legitimately be described as "Topshop punk", a look that suits her new sound. This is an album of bubblegum pop/rock that takes its cues from Kelly Clarkson (lead single 'It's Alright, It's OK'), Pink ('Masquerade'), The Veronicas ('Tell Me Lies') and, perhaps most frequently, Ashlee Simpson ('Hot Mess', 'Acting Out', 'Delete You').
Though the lyrics don't really bare scrutiny – Tisdale tells us she "can be anything you want me to be" on 'Masquerade', but insists she's "gotta be who I am underneath" on 'Overrated', the track that follows - Guilty Pleasure is mostly on the money. The likes of 'It's Alright, It's OK', 'Erase and Rewind' and 'Hot Mess' have choruses Max Martin wouldn't sniff at, boring ballads are kept to a minimum and Tisdale, though closer to Simpson than Clarkson in the vocal department, acquits herself admirably.
In fact, Guilty Pleasure only misfires twice - the two occasions Tisdale strays from her comfort zone. 'Crank It Up' shamelessly rips off Britney's robopop sound, right down to the Spears-aping vocals, while 'How Do You Love Someone' is a botched attempt at a Pink-style family confessional. It's utterly unconvincing and horribly cynical, not least because the supposedly soul-baring lyrics were written by professional songwriters with no input from Tisdale herself. She sounds far more comfortable singing lines like "My bangs are laughable but I don't mind 'cause I think it's kinda super cool" elsewhere on the album, making that title pretty accurate after all.
