Speak

Y’know, this doesn’t totally suck. In much the same way that teams of qualified professionals get together every few years to make perfectly listenable Avril Lavigne and Pink albums, a cavalcade of songwriters, producers, and musicians focus here on turning jailbait movie sensation Lindsay Lohan into a credible musical entity. They nearly succeed. Who knows if Lohan’s voice has been Auto-Tuned to death, but it sounds reasonable belting out the Vanessa Carlton–ish power ballad “Symptoms of You.” “Speak” filters Garbage via Kylie Minogue, but mostly Lohan is packaged on the same pop-rock axis where Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson loiter: crisp, tightly constructed tunes with shiny hooks exactly where they’re supposed to be. She’s also learned her Lolita lessons from Britney, snarling coy double entendres like “I wanna come first” and posing in various states of undress in the CD booklet. It’s fair to question how much input Lohan herself had in crafting this album, but just because it took a village to put this thing together doesn’t automatically make it horrible.