billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - july 4, 2015 (VIDEO)

Believe it or not, this review was absolute hell to get out - beyond just the lacklustre songs too.

Okay, finally time to deal with some old business - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - july 4, 2015

You ever see one of those charts on which not a lot really seemed to happen, but still gives you a feeling of foreboding regardless? Believe it or not, I got that feeling pretty strongly this week, because despite the fact very few new songs dropped or impacted the charts in any largely significant ways, I can see things are coming up for change across the board as the summer settles in.

video review: 'breathe in, breathe out' by hilary duff

Heh, so this happened. Not a lot to say, but I am happy I did this, it was fun.

Next up, Billboard BREAKDOWN, and then I've got FFS, Sun Kil Moon, and maybe I'll finally handle Kamelot... stay tuned!

album review: 'breathe in, breathe out' by hilary duff

Okay, confession time: I used to be a huge fan of Hilary Duff.

No, really. Back about a decade ago when I was a teenager and I was listening to Eminem and symphonic metal, I still listened to her. I watched the Lizzie McGuire Show, which on some level has not aged well at all. I watched the movie based off of the show. And perhaps most embarrassingly for a music critic, I listened to her music - and I was a fan too, to the point where I actually saw her live in concert.

And going back to those albums in the early-to-mid-2000s, most of the material is okay at best. Let's be honest, Hilary Duff was riding a wave where young starlets who could pull off a veneer of acoustic pop authenticity could rack up a fair number of hits. And considering Hilary was being backed by Disney and was signed to Hollywood Records, it was clear her handlers were aiming to capitalize on whatever residual buzz she had from Lizzie McGuire to turn out over-produced schlock that frankly Brie Larson was doing better anyway. The funny thing is going back to it, which she does have some real duds - that self-titled album is mediocre at best - her 2007 record Dignity saw her move in more of a electronic dancepop direction and it worked pretty well for her, as she had writing credits across the board. For me, I always got the impression she was a better writer than actual singer - she didn't have a ton of presence as a vocalist, and unlike Britney Spears, she wasn't about to pile on effects to compensate for it. 

And yet as dancepop was set to blow up with the club boom in the late 2000s, Hilary Duff left pop music entirely for a good eight years. She got married and divorced, had a baby, and did a lot of acting for TV and independent films, mostly in an effort to ditch the more wholesome Lizzie McGuire image. The interesting thing is that while her career hasn't been stellar by any stretch, she also hasn't had the stage of running wild and flaming out that hit other teen stars of her era like Amanda Bynes and Lindsey Lohan, which gave me the impression that the down-to-earth elements of Hilary's writing actually had some authenticity. But at the same time, until the requests started pouring in, I had no interest in looking into her most recent album. For one, she only had writing credits on a third of the record, and for another, it looked a bit like a cash-in, to rope back old fans who want to recapture those glory days almost a decade ago. Hell, that's why I'm here, so I took at look at Breathe In, Breathe Out - is it any good?