AMG Review of Beautiful Soul

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

Jesse McCartney used to be a part of turn-of-the-century teen pop also-rans Dream Street, a group who made a few waves in 2001, just as the renaissance of 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 cross-platform 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 grand-scale 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 who 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 by-the-books teen pop songs, 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 Nevil-written "Get Your Shine On" nearly trumps "Rock Your Body" as a successful update of Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. McCartney is still a teenager, still figuring out how to control his voice and use its sweet thinness as an advantage -- for anybody who 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 it's the songs that make this album a welcome surprise.