Jesse McCartney - Beautiful Soul (CD)

All Music Guide

Jesse McCartney used to be a part of turnofthecentury teenpop alsorans Dream Street, a group who made a few waves in 2001, just as the renaissance of the 1999/2000 was starting to draw to a close. Like other teenage showbiz kids, McCartney covered his bases after the group's demise, signing with Hollywood Records just before he landed a role on the 2004 WB show Summerland, which just happened to be scheduled to hit the airwaves not long after his debut solo album Beautiful Soul hit the stores in September 2004. This kind of crossplatform positioning was commonplace midway through the 2000s Britney Spears may have started it, but Hilary Duff perfected it, rising up through Disney TV as the lead of the delightful sitcom Lizzie McGuire before having a number one album in 2003 with her first grandscale pop album, Metamorphosis. That's the path that McCartney and his producers have chosen, and Beautiful Soul is a cross between Metamorphosis and Justin Timberlake's solo debut Justified. It'...s targeted at the preteens that made Hilary a star, so it's light and cheerful, but it has the sleek, sultry grooves that made Justified a blockbuster, which means that McCartney has a chance not only to flaunt a little maturity, he's given a direction where he can grow. While some of the material here is a bit generic (the ballads are a particular weakness), the songs that work are shockingly good. The bythebooks teenpop, like the lead single "She's No You," are engaging, but it's the tracks that draw deeply from Timberlake that really get the album moving the Robbie Nevilwritten "Get Your Shine On" nearly trumps "Rock Your Body" as a successful update of Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. Jesse McCartney is still a teenager, still figuring out how to control his voice and use its sweet thinness as an advantage for anybody that watched Bravo's brilliant series Showbiz Moms Dads he can't help but recall a Shane Klingensmith with talent but these songs suggest that he will be able to figure that out, and they're the songs that make this album a welcome surprise. - Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide Read more Less