POP
"Identified"
Vanessa Hudgens. Hollywood. 12 tracks.
Grade: C+

FILE (ENLARGE)
Vanessa Hudgens, a star of the 'High School Musical' franchise, follows her 2006 debut album, 'V,' with 'Identified,' an interesting and unexpected mix.
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"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 or, lyrical ambiguity being a coming-of-age hallmark, the transition from child star to adult maybe-star. "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 such as this would have sufficed to help mature her image, and yet "Identified" is far more interesting and unexpected. Hudgens has an exceedingly thin voice — her 2006 debut, "V," suffered mightily for it — 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. The R&B number "Last Night" inexplicably, and compellingly, features slide guitar; "Don't Ask Why" is an unforced apology for a breakup; and "Party on the Moon" and the title track are hypnotic electro-pop.

When the album leans on Hudgens' vocals, it proves foolish — her Christina Aguilera impression on "Sneakernight" fizzles — and in places the songwriting is startlingly simple ("Turn me off, turn me on, like the vibrate on your phone").

Still, "Hook It Up" is one of the year's most effervescent pop songs. Produced by the teen-pop auteurs Antonina Armato and Tim James of Rock Mafia, 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 Caramanica, New York Times

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