Hudgens' CD is surprising; Wolf Parade's complicated

Last Modified: Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 6:18 p.m.


Vanessa Hudgens


"Gone With the Wind" is the sort of song you would expect from someone who lives a very public life in the tabloids but still plays a wide-eyed high school student on the Disney Channel. A gently aching piano-soul number with echoes of Alicia Keys, it's the best vocal performance on "Identified," the second album from Vanessa Hudgens, a star of the "High School Musical" franchise.

"I don't care what anybody thinks/I've released that fear," Hudgens sings about the end of a traumatic relationship, lyrical ambiguity being a coming-of-age hallmark. "I don't have to be what you want me to be/Because every time I try to fit in/It feels like I'm in a prison."

A handful of songs like this would have sufficed to help mature her image, and yet "Identified" is far more interesting and unexpected. Hudgens has an exceedingly thin voice, so this is an album of digital manipulations, overcompensations and production flourishes. It's schizoid, but it routinely succeeds, very much in spite of itself.

Still, surprise is on her side, particularly on "Hook It Up," one of the year's most effervescent pop songs. It's feisty, aggressive and thrusting, a club-oriented construction that owes debts to Fergie and to cheerleading routines. Though there's some residue of where Hudgens has been, it's mostly a glimmer of where she might go.

- Jon Caramanicia

"At Mount Zoomer"

Wolf Parade


"Strike up the band as the ship goes down," Dan Boeckner sings in "The Grey Estates" on "At Mount Zoomer," the second album by the Montreal band Wolf Parade. "Strike up the band, we have survived," sings its other songwriter, Spencer Krug, in "Bang Your Drum."

There's always something major at stake in the songs of Wolf Parade, which harnesses perky pop drive to existential reflections. The lyrics are the thoughts of a jittery urbanite pondering destruction, renewal, love, art and the meaning of home. The songs don't hide their seriousness.

But they don't let it slow them down either.

Krug's analog-sounding keyboards have the upper hand over Boeckner's guitar in the arrangements, with pumping chords, insistent little hooks, synthesizer shimmers and progressive-rock arpeggios. The music is rooted in 1970s rock and 1980s new wave, from Supertramp to Talking Heads, and it pushes toward choruses that sound anthemic but are filled with uncertainty: "Will you burn your bridges down/singing la la la la la la la."

Wolf Parade rarely allows itself pop's simple release. The two men's reedy voices come across as more harried than heroic. And often the keyboard bits are linked into structures that are neat yet crowded; just when one riff grows familiar and hummable, an eager new one shows up to displace it. It's invigorating during a song, but a little exhausting over the length of an album. In Wolf Parade's music it takes constant, frenetic construction to hold potential catastrophe at bay.

- Jon Pareles


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