There’s a real bind for Kylie Minogue. Her core audience want disco pop, people like me slag her off if she branches out from disco pop and goes country, she does disco pop well… but it’s really, really hard to do disco pop relentlessly well all the time.
She’s done much, much better at it than pretty much anyone else on the planet: her creative longevity and continued cultural relevance has been truly something to behold, she’s proved that being a pop princess isn’t only about providing low-camp fizz and sensation in the moment (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course) but can resonate through the decades, through people’s lives, and through our culture.
And she keeps coming up with bangers, ones in which her voice and personality are integral – as with last year’s global smash “Padam Padam”, which came with the very decent Tension album. So in one sense there’s no reason she shouldn’t just keep rinsing and repeating – always different, always the same as John Peel used to say of The Fall. But did we really need a sequel to Tension? And did we really need it to be only fizzy dancefloor pumpers?
There’s nothing offensive here – though “Taboo” does veer closer to the recent novelty remix of Boney M’s “Rasputin” than it does to Madonna’s “Hung Up” which one suspects it was intended to reference, and “Lights Camera Action” sounds purpose-written to be a novelty “bit” for a light entertainment show. And there’s a few great tunes, like the irepressible piano rave of The Blessed Madonna collaboration “Edge of Saturday Night” and the deeply disconcerting double-edged hymn to moving on, “Good as Gone.” But all in all it seems stretched a bit thin.
It seems a little churlish to want more, given how impressive it is that she’s reached this point at all. Maybe I just don’t have her disco stamina, maybe it’s snobbishness on my part, I don’t know. Maybe I am the fun police! But given that she’s got a career that in its earlier acts included dreamy classics like “Breathe”, “Confide in Me”, “Slow” and “Put Yourself in my Place”, is it too much to ask for a little… well… breathing space? Is it too much to think what a truly mature Kylie album – one not beholden to American soft rock drives like the last attempt Golden was, one with orchestras, torch songs and just a bit less brutally relentless drive forwards – might sound like?
Listen to "Edge of Saturday Night":
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