It's so rare and refreshing when a teen star takes the high road. Mandy Moore doesn't seem the most likely candidate to actually put music first: This B-level Orlando upstart played the jailbait card with her initial hit, "Candy," then released an album, I Wanna Be With You, that was essentially a reconfigured, slightly improved reissue of her 1999 debut. But her new CD offers the most startlingly liberated teen pop since Eighties mall-rat icon Tiffany euphemistically declared herself "New Inside."

Like Tiffany, Moore is more protorocker than R&B wanna-be. The neo-Sixties go-go of "Split Chick" argues that this seventeen-year-old should have starred in Josie and the Pussycats, while "When I Talk to You" suggests she could become the next Lisa Loeb. The Middle Eastern flavors of the single "In My Pocket" and other deliciously weird tracks raise a rhetorical question: Who knew Moore was the real genie in a bottle?

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”