Tribute To Avril Lavigne CD

That there even is a tribute album to a teenage singer with only one album under her belt is credit to the marketing escalator that Avril Lavigne has ridden all the way to pop's top floor. While she is routinely credited/blamed with expanding/distorting the notion of what a female pop star should be, Lavigne's success is due in large part to a savvy mix of her vocal strengths and top-shelf professional songwriting. Sure, there's Lavigne herself, who delights in pranks like flipping the bird at TV cameras and goofing around with her good-natured band of interchangeable skateboard dudes. But behind the Hot Topic wristbands, tank tops, camo, and neckties is a gigantic machine called hype whose engine never stops running. It's that hype that's responsible for this shameless tribute record. Versions of "Complicated," "Sk8er Boi," "Losing Grip," and nine other tracks from Let Go are performed here by a group of unknown studio musicians masquerading under the moniker Ex-Prom Queens; "Too Much to Ask" was inexplicably left off. Mostly, Tribute to Avril Lavigne is just creepy, since it's obvious that the woman singing is much older than Lavigne (i.e., an adult). It makes the catty, freshman-homeroom lyrics of "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi" pretty hard to take. Removing Lavigne's precocious attitude problem from the songs is even more weird, simply because they were co-written by her with big-league songwriters like the Matrix, who presumably are not teenagers, either. Maybe there should have been a tribute to Lavigne's marketing and management teams, instead of this confusing release. ~ Johnny Loftus

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Recording information: Scandalous Traxx, Detroit, MI.