TRACKS:

1. Who Loves Ya Baby?
   
2. Lost In Your Eyes
   
3. Love In Disguise
   
4. Helplessly In Love
   
5. Silence Speaks (A Thousand Words)
   
6. Should've Been the One
   
7. Electric Youth
   
8. No More Rhyme
   
9. Over the Wall
   
10. We Could Be Together
    
11. Shades of the Past
    

(All songs written by Deborah Gibson and published by Creative Bloc Music Ltd. / Deborah Ann's Music, ASCAP.)

Coming little over a year after Out of the Blue, this second effort is a more adventrous album of songs from Debbie. Obviously more in control of her direction, this album is more satisfying in the long term, simply because she experiments a bit more.

Having said that, the opening track, Who Loves Ya Baby?, is fairly standard musically, although a very good song lyrically. It's a good opener, but it suffers when followed by everybody's favourite, Lost In Your Eyes. This gorgeous piano ballad demonstrates Debbie's superb voice quite beautifully.

Love in Disguise and Helplessly in Love are similar, in that they are both about her wishing she was with "the love of my life", although the latter is the better song.

The desperately sad Silence Speaks (A Thousand Words) changes the whole tone of the album. This song, like Play the Field on Out of the Blue, belies Deborah's youth and is more mature than the rest of the songs. (Although, 'mature' does not always equal 'good'!). The story of a painful breakup-in-progress, Silence Speaks... is at once sad, and yet pretty.

Should've Been the One lifts the album, a fine sixties style (the tune, rather than the music) foot-tapper. Hardly profound lyrically, but "you know it makes no difference to me"! Her youth anthem Electric Youth follows in a suitably upbeat vein. This stunning song demands that the elders of society - teachers, politicians, parents - listen to the youth because they can make as much sense as, if not more than, them. "Don't lose sight of potential mastermind", she insists, and who'd argue?

No More Rhyme is another grown-up love song, wherein Deb wonders what if something happened to spoil her relationship with her partner, because she is so inexperienced in romantic affairs ("It's just we never had to struggle/ It all came too easy ... / We've never suffered a broken heart"). Over the Wall deals with a subject that Debbie would come back to with Anything Is Possible, that of going after what you want, without fear of losing it. It's a good fast number.

We Could Be Together is one of my favourite Debbie Gibson songs of all. It is about friendship, and belonging to whatever group you want to belong to. (That 'do what you like' attitude again).

The album closes with Shades of the Past, a melancholy song about laying to rest a difficult event in the past: "Say goodbye to our yesterdays / And leave behind those shades of grey".