Album Review: The Time Of Our Lives [EP] by Miley Cyrus

Given that she’s already conquered the worlds of country and dance-pop, it was only a matter of time until tween queen Cyrus took ? a crack at hip-hop, as she does here on ”Party in the U.S.A.,” a bouncy Dr. Luke jam that finds Hannah Montana ?lost (and loving it) in Hollywood. ?Elsewhere on The Time of Our Lives, an eclectic Walmart-only mini-album, Cyrus works her ?husky chirp over big-beat disco-garage (”Talk Is Cheap”), paranoid synth-rock (”Kicking and Screaming”), and ?Les Miz-style power balladry (”Obsessed”).

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If Breakout began to establish Miley Cyrus as a singing star in her own right, free of Hannah Montana baggage, then Time of Our Lives is another confident step in that direction. The Time of Our Lives still boasts a couple of frothy, Hannah-esque party anthems, the title track and "Party in the USA. " Though Cyrus' voice borders on shrill on both songs, they'll please Montana fans (that goes double for the live version of "Before the Storm" with the Jonas Brothers).

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No matter how many provocative Annie Leibowitz shots Miley Cyrus poses for, as long as her sole professional association is with Disney TV and its record label, she'll always find it hard to convince those past puberty that there's much more to her than concentrated gosh-darned-shucks wholesomeness. She is wholesome, that much is undeniable, but she has her name on plenty of inventive, imaginative and precisely calibrated examples of modern chart pop, songs that would have been noticed beyond her audience of young girls had they come from a more credible source. This mini-album opens with one such, Kicking and Screaming, a declamatory techno-rock exercise of the sort that characterised Girls Aloud's golden period.

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