Rating: 3/5
Verdict: Mothers beware: Hannah Montana's in leathers
Miley Cyrus looks just like Britney Spears did 10 years ago - this album cover features her pouting behind tousled hair, wearing a Spears-esque cropped top and low-slung pants. She's also the same age as Spears was when she gyrated her way to fame in 1999. However, she sounds more like that other name teenage girls fell over a few years ago, the pierced and punkier Avril Lavigne, who, at about the same age pelted out angsty vocals about about boys and things.
That's right, good girl Miley Cyrus, famous for flicking her blond locks around on Disney Channel show Hannah Montana, has stripped her cutesy image, and much of her clothing, to fit in with all the other naughty girl pop stars. She's all grown up, she tells us, through the album's title track Can't Be Tamed and lyrics like "who owns my heart?". But though Cyrus is old enough to have a steady boyfriend, she remains aware she has some very young fans who still dance around to her Disney character's songs If We Were A Movie and One In A Million. And because of this, the 12 tracks on her first album after Hannah Montana aren't too raunchy nor too angsty and even feature a few life lessons like "the only thing real, when push comes to shove, are the acts of forgiveness and love".
Is it good? Well, we all knew Cyrus could sing (her Disney character juggled regular teen life with being a pop star) so the fact that she has released an album is no surprise - and she does have a powerful, mature voice. But to say that her cover of Poison's Every Rose Has Its Thorn is an oasis between some grating, largely auto-tuned pop would put it nicely.
Dance-pulsed pop tracks Permanent December, with its Ke$ha-like rap, and Two More Lonely People are certainly punchier than the songs she sang in her younger, blonder days, and these suit her better than her watered-down attempt to be dirty in Can't Be Tamed, as the latter sounds a bit, well, wrong.
Meanwhile the piano-accompanied ballad about heartbreak, Stay, shows off her best caramel-smooth vocals - and because she doesn't have anything as catchy as her foresisters Spears and Lavigne, perhaps she should stick to this very wholesome style for a while longer.
