Review: On new CD, she's just being Miley

(Entertainment Weekly) -- Miley Cyrus promised her new album would be more grown-up -- it's the kind of talk that sets off alarm bells when you're a 15-year-old tween idol coming off a controversial, bare-backed Vanity Fair photo shoot.

She's already got a raspy, middle-aged rocker chick's voice; would she suddenly try to live up to it with more provocative material?

A clue to the answer comes in "Breakout's" opening verse, a harangue against life's cruelest inequities: ''Every week's the same/Stuck in school's so lame/My parents say that I'm lazy/Getting up at 8 a.m.'s crazy/Tired of bein' told what to do/So unfair, so uncool.''

With that, a sigh of parental relief is heard across the land: Our little girl isn't growing up. Phew.

Actually, Cyrus did just the right amount of maturing with her last CD, "Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus", a step up from the wish-fulfillment anthems of Disney's Hannah Montana into guitar-fueled, boy-crazy power pop.

This successor mostly follows the same templates, tossing in a Go-Go's influence for good measure (drummer Gina Schock even co-wrote and sings on the ''Vacation''-esque title track).

"Breakout's" best tunes let Cyrus be feisty without graduating to Avril-like levels of petulance: ''Full Circle,'' ''The Driveway,'' and the single ''7 Things,'' which veers from sensitive breakup song in the strummy verses to punky-pop kiss-off in the double-time choruses.

Here, her demands for repentance are amusingly age-appropriate: ''Your sincere apology...when you mean it, I'll believe it/If you text it, I'll delete it.'' U go, grl.

After all this fun, "Breakout's" second half gets overly ballad-heavy -- guess that's where the growing up factors in -- although, impressively, she's a dead ringer for the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines on the mournful ''These Four Walls.''

And then we discover the one clunker, ''Wake Up America'' -- Cyrus' eco-anthem, on which she pleads for the earth: ''Can you give her a little attention?''

The song's a dud, but you've gotta love that she talks about our troubled planet as if it were a needy adolescent.

EW Grade: B

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