Kiss Me Once
Having been in the industry for 27 years that was meant to last 27 minutes, it is only fitting that as Kylie Minogue celebrates her twelfth studio album there should be a few questions. How? And why? I don’t mean this with any malice or sarcasm: whatever you think of the music itself, it’s heartening that one of Britain’s biggest pop stars is a 45-year-old woman.
Pop and particularly the shiny, shallow strain peddled by Minogue may be a game for young people, but these days she isn’t competing with acts who weren’t born when she released her first single but with acts who weren’t born when she made her ill starred post-Britpop bid for indie credibility. In pop career terms, if you last 27 years you’re like one of those tortoises they find on tropical islands, still apparently flourishing despite photographs clearly showing them at Victorian tea parties with Lord Baden Powell or General Gordon; and yet here she is in 2014 not so much at the height of her powers that would be Fever, which sold six million copies worldwide as near enough not to matter: her albums go platinum as reliably as clockwork; her tours make tens of millions of pounds.
This can’t wholly be put down to some unearthly nonpareil talent: her voice doesn’t make you want to stick cheese in your ears, but nor does everything stop turning when she sings. She’s hardly the queen of perfectly executed reinvention either. There are moments when she seems to yearn for something a little more mature and weighty sounding, too well might you if you were 45 years old singing “You’re sexy what you need’s a sexy love give me that sexy love, you look so sexy” on Sexy Love but when orchestras or alt rock bands or indeed chart friendly material boasting a slightly more sophisticated sheen haven’t yielded the desired response from the public, she seems to go back to doing what people want without complaint. Nor has her audience bought into any gripping character led narrative arc: she’s as skilled as saying almost nothing in interviews as she is at saying nothing worth hearing; her interior life rarely makes it into her music.
When you listen to Kiss Me Once, it begins to occur to you that the absence of a personality could be the reason why Minogue has been around for so long; unlike Madonna’s recent music, her songs never sound like an artist trying to fit their individuality into current trends in pop because she doesn’t have one. This record does however cover recent pop rather well, from brostep to 90s house revival to the on-going ubiquity of Pharrell Williams, who is featured on a song called I Was Gonna Cancel.
It’s the first but surely not last major pop album we’ll hear this year that’s been influenced by Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories; its echoes can be found on Beautiful, a ballad which features about seven million vocoders and a chugging vintage synth that’s very Giorgio By Moroder: it also features a male vocalist who turns out to be Enrique By Iglesias.
Meanwhile Sexy Love is a pretty blatant attempt at recapturing Get Lucky’s disco magic. Shameless or not though, it’s a really good song: good enough in fact for you not wonder which of its five co-authors Wayne Hector, Autumn Rowe, Peter Wallevik Mich, Hedin Hansen and Daniel Heløy Davidsen wrote the lyrics until afterwards when realise it was probably one of them doesn’t speak English as their first language.
That said Sexy Love is like Marvell wooing his Coy Mistress compared to Sexercise which gets itself into such muddle trying come up with sport-related metaphors for sex that starts coming phrases which mean something other than what they’re supposed . “I want see beat all your best times,” purrs Minogue: well if you’re absolutely sure that’s what want I can probably be at “finishing line”, so speak in about 90 seconds flat.
However unexpected or perhaps even undeserved given her premature ejaculation endorsement, Kiss Me Once does at least offer up what could well be the most workaday explanation for Kylie Minogue’s longevity. She can get good songs out of people who write them for everyone, a tradition that dates back to her Stock, Aitken and Waterman singles no So Macho or I’d Rather Jack for Miss Minogue and continues through the age of Sia Furler and Cutfather.
Occasionally, it has to be said, they palm her off with filler Million Miles, Feels So Good or stuff like Into the Blue, which isn’t a song so much as a compendium of musical clichés among which Auto Tuned vocals and Coldplay-inspired “ey-oh”ing figure heavily: were it any more blatantly battery farmed Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall would be making an investigative documentary about it. But with equal frequency they give her something genuinely great.
Pharrell may be ubiquitous but I Was Gonna Cancel is a really effervescent instance of what he does best, complete with an improbable sample of an opera singer. Kiss Me Once is superior bubblegum; a fantastic collision of sci-fi electronics and glossy AOR melody while the blaring 80s synth and warped vocal samples of Les Sex trust me on this one; the less time we spend pondering over its lyrics the better border quite thrillingly on cacophony.
Many of the same characterizations could be made about numerous other Kylie Minogue albums: a few excellent songs surrounded by a lot of average ones, plus some really bad lyrics about sex. Those records sold millions and so will this one. You can’t deny that she is still capable of making glossy pop music that lacks depth when people who weren’t even alive when she released her ill advised post Britpop bid for indie credibility have grown old and retired.
Watch Kiss Me Once For Free On Solarmovies.