Lost in the shuffle of the ever-growing
High School Musical
phenomenon -- growing so big, it can no longer be contained on the
Disney Channel
, it's now reaching theaters for its third and final installment -- is that the tween-sensation is actually a musical. Which means that despite its pop trappings, the soundtracks consist of full-blown show tunes, songs that serve the story and are sung by the rotating cast. This helps make the movies work, but it sentences the soundtracks to be mere souvenirs of the event, a record for fans to play endlessly, not a means to crossover to a wider pop audience. On
HSM3
, there are only two songs that stand out as potential pop singles, both not so coincidentally solo showcases for the franchise's two biggest stars,
Vanessa Hudgens
and
Zac Efron
.
Hudgens
has the album's best song in the slickly soulful
"Walk Away"
-- a tune that would have shown up
Wilson Phillips
circa 1990 -- that she sings better than
Efron
, whose
"Scream"
struts like
*NSYNC
circa 2000. But both are upstaged by stage brat
Ashley Tisdale
, who shows far more on-record charisma on her fame-hungry showcase
"I Want It All,"
a song that has absolutely no chance of making sense outside of the senior skip-day plot line of
High School Musical 3
, but
Tisdale
performs with ingratiating vigor, using every chop she's learned as a stage kid. Of course, those very strengths are well-suited for a musical like
, where the songs are vehicles for showboating performances either on the screen or in a fan's bedroom -- and for those fans, this set, which is similar in every way to its two predecessors, will not disappoint. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine