Bauble Gum, 3 out of 5 Stars
I really liked the previous Jonas Brothers album, A Little Bit Longer. The kids seemed to be letting out all their adolescent rock fantasies and made a power pop album worthy of comparisons to Cheap Trick or The Raspberries. But this time, they seem to be hedging their bets. Like all great teen idols, they know the half-life on their fans' attention is a short one, so aiming for a mature sound was bound to happen. The sad part is the unintended consequences.
While I love the occasional snappiness of a good bubblegum record, this time "Line Vines and Trying Times" ditches the snappiness in favor of too much polish. There's more bauble than bubble here, and that's not a good thing. Instead of letting the guitars crunch to the front of the song, horns and strings crowd to the fore on almost every song. These songs sound more like TV commercials than teen-rock, more like Las Vegas show-tunes than 'Hello Cleveland!' arena ready singles. There's even the now obligatory country-crossover ballad, a duet with fellow Disney Kid Miley Cyrus. Rapper Common adds to the ridiculous "Don't Charge Me For The Crime."
There's far too many forced attempts at relevancy here, when they were doing just fine with the candy-floss. Remember when Shaun Cassidy tried to get serious by recording with Todd Rundgren and covering David Bowie and Ian Hunter? The album was called WASP and was such a commercial disaster that it's never even been released on CD. When the Jonas Brothers start trying to pass themselves off as 'serious,' I keep wondering how long it will be before they end up making something similar. The JB's "World War III" and "Paranoid" have the goods, but the rest of the album just tries way too hard.
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