Has there ever been another pop star quite as shameless as Ashlee Simpson? Probably so, but nobody has ever quite so cravenly followed fashion’s shifting tides as Ashlee, who has never seemed the slightest bit embarrassed to make herself over when styles changed. All this desperate trend-chasing has been done in public, as it damn well should be in the 21st century, so we’ve seen her change from the spunky younger sister of a superstar to the sad goth clown of her sophomore effort to the Gwen Stefani wannabe of her third album, Bittersweet World. Ashlee might look like a shadow of her former self on the album cover — the years and cosmetic surgery have made her virtually unrecognizable from the awkward teen on the cover of I Am Me — but she still sounds the same, still boasting that same thin, girlish voice that wouldn’t have gotten much attention if she weren’t Jessica Simpson’s younger sister. Of course, the ironic thing about Ashlee’s career is that she not only had bigger hits than Jessica, she made better records than her sister, too, all with a virtually nonexistent voice and a personality as aggressively shallow as Avril Lavigne. Like Avril, Ashlee has a distinct arc to her three-act career, bouncing back from a dour and dumb second album with a return to the fizzy fun of her first (unlike Avril, Simpson seems like she would at least wait for you to leave the room before she started saying mean things about you.) Overal, the CD is not that bad. I mean when you can get penciled into Timbalands production schedule at a hefty 50,000K/day rate, I’m convinced he could turn out a hit with the woman who played Alice on the Brady Bunch.
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