Resistance Is Futile: <i>High School Musical 2</i> Is Here

ARTIST: Various Artists TITLE: High School Musical 2 WEB DEBUT: Aug. 8, 2007 RELEASE DATE: Aug. 14, 2007

ONE-LISTEN VERDICT: If you heard the original High School Musical soundtrack then you know what to expect: super-sugary, super-“produced,” super-catchy uptempo singalongs designed for imitating the formation dancing of the terminally perky starlets in your rec room, songs that seem to suggest teenpop (or maybe music in general) reached perfection circa late 1998/early 1999 (the first golden age of Max Martin). Everything is recorded at hyper-compressed full tilt, a midrange exploding with flashpot bursts of glossy guitars and synth horns like game day fireworks, and the singing ranges from “pep rally” to “Coke commericial.” Even with the lyrics being so closely tied to the movie’s plot, a lot of HSM2 is obviously hella catchy, if ultimately exhausting in full for any Idolator reader who doesn’t have a lot of time for the sucrose excesses of musical theater/Radio Disney. (Even Britney and the Backstreet Boys had more bite than this.) But does it even really matter what it sounds like, at least to anyone over 14? It’s going to drop next Tuesday, hit No. 1, sell more copies than anything else released in 2007, and help keep the music industry afloat for another year.

THE BEST TRACK: “Work This Out” will remind all of us old folks of pop radio circa 1986-88–i.e. it aims for cutesy Prince and flops down somewhere closer to Roxette (that guitar!)–with an instrumental bridge that manages to pile on every percussion excess (fake steel drums, handclaps, Sheila E. fills, freestyle stabs) of the Jam/Lewis era, albeit if the Minneapolis Machine had been zonked out of their minds on pixie sticks. Runner up is the chugging, ersatz glam beat/surf guitars of “All For One,” which could be a great Girls Aloud single if it wasn’t so goddamn over the top. Then again, “so goddamn over the top” is kinda the point.