Ryan Cabrera

It's not even really necessary to hear Ryan Cabrera's music to peg him as The Next Big Thing. All you need to know is he's young, blond, good-looking, used to date Ashlee Simpson, and got Goo Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik to produce his debut album. With assets like that, how can you go wrong?

Well, you could go wrong by totally sucking, but on Take It All Away, Cabrera proves he's got the talent to back up the image. While a lot of the credit for the disc's slickly produced pop-rock must go to Rzeznik, Cabrera has an undeniable flair writing a rock-solid hook and delivering it in one of those plaintive, falsetto-laced tenors that makes teenaged girls go all shrieky and weak-kneed. He's got a fair shot at knocking his ex-girlfriend off the top of the charts.

Cabrera famously quit his punk-rock roots (but not his spiky bleach-blond 'do) when he discovered Dave Matthews, but the sound on Take It All Away owes more to poppier alt-rockers like Matchbox Twenty and Third Eye Blind, with maybe a dash of Jimmy Eat World-style emo-pop and a smidgen of Jack Johnson's beach-bonfire folk-rock. The insanely catchy "Let's Take Our Time" is the obvious standout, but nearly everything here is hook-heavy and radio-friendly. Brace yourselves for Ryan-mania. - Andy Hermann

Golden-spiked pop/rock boy-child Ryan Cabrera is consumed by teenage heartbreak. As the protagonist for nearly every song on his (better than it should be) major-label debut, Take It All Away, he pines for loves both past and present like a deer on the highway faced with the field, the median, or the truck. For the most part it's the latter that the young "heart-rocker" chooses to get into it with, but the singer/songwriter/guitarist and his golden-tipped man-child/producer -- Johnny Rzeznik from the Goo Goo Dolls -- have concocted such a lively musical landscape for their "dear diary" lyrics that it's almost impossible not to smile amid the frank -- albeit clichéd -- emotional wreckage. From the opening "Mr. Blue Sky"-style piano rocker "Let's Take Our Time" to the falsetto-rich tenderness of "True," Cabrera proves himself to be more than just another pretty face with a lot of industry money behind him. He's got a great voice, a knack for incorporating Beatlesque key changes into otherwise mediocre melodies, and a healthy, irony-free take on angst that will earn him a raging sea of young women to wade through. Rzeznik fills each track with a combination of modern Pro Tools wizardry and good old-fashioned guitar playing -- ornate finger-picked acoustics appear randomly throughout -- and it's a testament to his industry tenacity that each one sounds like a potential hit. Take It All Away is as disposable as the pop genre itself, and Cabrera is the perfect proxy, but if he can ride out the fleeting fame and fortune that goes hand in hand with a big-money/radio-ready industry record, he might just have what it takes to build a career on his own terms. ~ James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide