I regard TEENAGE DREAM as a guilty pleasure; I think Katy herself has a irritating personality and her vocal abilities are somewhat limited, so she needs slick production [Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Benny Blanco, Rico Love, Greg Wells, Tricky Stewart, Stargate] to boost it.

But she does make up for this with a solid song-writing talent; She has co-wrote every track on TEENAGE DREAM, while guest writers include the likes of Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin, Bonnie McKee, Benjamin Levin, Calvin Broadus and Greg Wells.

Katy herself admitted to not wanting to alienate her existing fanbase by changing her sound, so it's good news for 'One Of The Boys' lovers, however I was not wowed by that album so was unsure about getting this. What changed my mind was the fact that she released three promotion singles [Not Like The Movies, Circle The Drain and E.T.] on US Itunes in the run up to the album's release and I loved those; and if the label released those early then they must be saving the best tracks for the official release, right?

Wrong. The promotional tracks and the already released singles are by far the best things that the album has to offer. To be blunt; There isn't one new song that instantly strikes me as solid single worthy material. 'Firework' is rumoured to be the third single - all I can say to that is thank God the album was released first.

But it's not all bad news; Out of the remaining seven tracks there's only one track [Peacock] that I instantly took a dislike to, and since it's one of those songs that gets stuck in your head, I still sneakily listen to it. In fact: There's only two songs out of the twelve that I skip, and whilst the remaining songs are too samey to the stronger tracks, I wouldn't call them bad.

At the end of the day I consider TEENAGE DREAM to be a solid album and find it much stronger than 'One Of The Boys'. Oh; The CD is scented with a candy floss fragrance. Cute. [AA]