Hilary Duff (album) - Critical Response

Critical Response

Reviews were mixed to negative. Ken Barnes of USA Today, which gave Metamorphosis a negative review, commented positively on the album and said it exemplified "a more wholesome brand of rock-flavored pop aimed at teens". Barnes praised the "unstoppably rousing choruses" in some of the songs and said "Duff avoids overextending her thin but pleasant voice, except for a bit of Avrilesque syllable stretching", while he criticised the high number of tracks and the preponderance of "hackneyed self-affirmation messages". Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine categorised Hilary Duff as "a virtual companion to Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography, from its rock/dance-pop fusion to its earnest demeanor" and "a varied, ambitious album ... it feels like the soundtrack to the life of a smart, ambitious, popular teenager trying to sort things out".

A review of Hilary Duff in The Village Voice was far less praising; it said "Duff's role in the tween-rock firmament is playing pious Lisa Loeb opposite Simpson's post-diluvian Courtney Love ... despite liberal amounts of gold-dust guitar glitter, blow-dried backing vocals, and even the post-crash-Skynyrd 'Rock This World', Hilary Duff is too often the vanilla-bean fantasia AOR chauvinists take all girl-pop for." Stylus magazine wrote that Duff's attempt to follow "the template that she previously softened" yielded "mixed results ... to a certain extent, is a prisoner of her image and her attempts at Chrissie Hynde-intensity fall far short of even Ashlee Simpson's gravelly vocal cords." Its critic described the album's length as its "simple problem", saying that with "a little quality control ... this could easily be as strong as any other teen-pop album released this year."

In response to Duff's "announcement" that "she's a complicated rock & roll adolescent on the order of Avril and Ashlee", Entertainment Weekly wrote, "Uh-huh. And Betty from the Archie comics is Patti Smith", noting Duff's "tiny" voice is "buried under layers of generic cheese arrangements." Sal Cinquemani of Slant called the album "a seemingly endless string of three-and-a-half-minute pieces of pop crap – and I like pop music", and wrote that although Duff "can't be held responsible for most of the album's insipid lyrical content", "when gets in on the action things feel contrived". The New York Daily News named it the worst teen pop album of 2004, saying it was "eck-and-neck for junkiest CD of the year with her arch nemesis, Lindsay Lohan ".