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Kylie
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Polydor
Has there ever been a more hit and miss pop star than Kylie? I don’t mean mediocre mind. When La Minogue is on top form she’s unbeatable. Slow? A diamond. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head? One of the all time great pop songs. Confide In Me? If you insist. The thing is though, she hasn’t really released an album that isn’t peppered with duff tracks here and there. Even Ultimate Kylie (where by rights she should be on home ground) is just over 50% whack by sheer dint of the fact it’s a double album instead of single.
So recently the papers have canonised her because of her stoical behaviour in the face of awful rotten boyfriends, poor health and the like. (Interestingly, she would be the ideal choice of person to replace Diana in the nation’s hearts – she seems completely unable to do anything stupid in public, she knows the Royal Family’s greatest trick – never say anything to anyone and she has a truly chameleonic look that encompasses everything bar the overtly sexual. Ah, if only she weren’t from pop’s penal colony.) And really she’s in an ideal position to seize the crown of pop back from the young pretenders but she’s steadfastly refused to take it. Or rather, one could presume, her ‘people’ have steadfastly refused to back her completely.
So the new album is frustratingly patchy. If it was a dairy spread it would be called ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better’. Kylie has obviously decided to do a Timberlake but somewhere along the chain of command, someone has decided not to put their hand in their pocket and pay for a Timbaland or The Neptunes. So we get Rn’B inflected pop, breezy and spacious beats with a sprinkling of shimmering acid electro and glam disco here and there. Trouble is the second you start getting too close to it you notice the rank whiff of focus group song writing. The influence of the dreaded ‘agency’. The kind of writing that works for comedy is the kiss of death for pop music.
Things start off well enough with 2 Hearts a catchy little
glam stomper sung by The Sweet’s sweet young sister. In the background you can
hear Alison Goldfrapp shouting for her old discarded songs back as it’s time
for them to start working on a new album but nonetheless it’s great. Again Like
A Drug is pretty good; it starts off like Song 4 Mutya (but crucially, never
turns into it) before settling into a serviceable pop groove. And then it just
shrugs and settles into ‘Will this do?’ Which just seems to be a default
position for British pop at the moment. Which is fucking terrible because Kylie
could have been a national treasure. If she had have moved to
