Kylie Minogue - DISCO (Review)
Kylie's fifteenth album proves why pop music should move on so fast, and has me concerned as to the music we'll be hearing artists like Selena making in twenty years...
6th November 2020
BMG
My Rating:
---
2.8
/10
---
REVIEW
I could quite easily copy and paste the review of BTS's "Dynamite" here for this entire album, and it would be almost entirely accurate. In short? This is disco music SEVERELY lacking in personality, fun, or distinction, a pastiche that fails to prove its necessity, and one that couldn't be more out of place in the current pandemic striken climate. Should I go on? Do I want to? No, but of course I shall.
Kylie Minogue has had a career spanning thirty years, five decades and fifteen albums, and throughout this period of time she's been almost exlusively rooted in dance pop, significantly breaking from this mold only once on her last album, 2018's Golden, a diversion into a perplexing country pop direction that followed cues from Miley Cyrus of all people, and failed to be any more interesting than the rest of Kylie's large, boring discography.
Here on DISCO, Kylie takes things in a trendy direction, whilst somehow maintaining her complete and utter lack of cool. The sound of 70s and 80s pop, of indulgence and materialism and flashy love, has never been more popular, and yet the current wave of this kind of pop is at its best when embracing the darkness of the current world, using the music as escapist ecstasy whilst the lyrics often possess darker undertones, better reflecting the mood of our world. One of the best examples of this would be the entirery of The Weeknd's newest album, but it's also sporadically present on songs from Dua Lipa, Tones & I, Sam Smith and BENEE, to varying degrees of success.
This shift is not universal of course, and plenty of phenomenal artists have chosen not to pursue this avenue. That being said, Kylie's take on the sound comes across as ignorantly blissful, misrepresentative of what pop music is and should be, stuck in the past to a fault. Perhaps I should expect no less coming from someone who's career began over thirty years ago, but there are plenty of older artists who still manage to be creative and forward thinking, and Kylie is not one of them.
Now, everything that I've just said is a problem, yes, but it isn't necessarily a barrier to my enjoyment of the album; however, I do not in fact enjoy this album whatsoever, and that primarily comes down to the fact that Kylie has almost no presence or personality across these songs. Her voice has none of the commanding sensuality of Dua Lipa, nor the emotive, bulldozing power of a Gloria Gaynor, a Whitney Houston, or even ABBA. No, her vocals fail to match the instrumentals, thin and unengaging over the top of some genuinely great genuinely fun grooves and, in the case of a track like "Monday Blues" a great instrumental overall.
The lyrics too are offensively basic, lacking the simplistic rawness of Donna Summer and the storytelling of ABBA, who I now realise I've mentioned more in this review than probably ever over the course of this blog. The best the lyrics get are eyeroll-able, and the worst is retch-inducingly cringy ("want you in the worst way / it ain't even your birthday"). Overall though, if you're listening to Kylie for the lyrics then there are bigger problems for you to be worried about than the lack of substance in this album.
I think what I'm trying to get across this review is this: if you can't get this out of your head, you're probably not the right audience for my blog, and I apologise for the fact you ended up here. If, like me, you feel this is one of the cheapest sounding big-name albums of the year, a record so devoid of substance and intrigue that you really shouldn't care but for whatever reason you do... well, if that's you, then you're going to love my year end lists.
Why did I even review this...
TRACK RATINGS (/10)
1. Magic - 3
2. Miss a Thing - 4
3. Real Groove - 3
4. Monday Blues - 3
5. Supernova - 5
6. Say Something - 3
7. Last Chance - 4
8. I Love It - 2
9. Where Does the DJ Go? - 2
10. Dance Floor Darling - 2
11. Unstoppable - 2
12. Celebrate You - 2
BREAKDOWN
Ambition: 1
Atmosphere: 5
Catchiness/Enjoyability: 2
Content/Ideas: 1
Emotion/Engaging: 2
Execution: 3
Production: 6
Structure: 4
---
Lyrics: 2
Vocals/Flows: 2
---
Total: 28
Comments
Post a Comment