KYLIE MINOGUE DISCO (BMG)
The star’s latest album, recorded underneath a duvet, is yet more evidence of her tenacity, says Neil Mccormick
What do you imagine Kylie Minogue has been up to during the pandemic? Dancing around her kitchen to disco songs, or taking a crash course in audio engineering to master Logic computer sound recording? Both, as it turns out.
Kylie’s 15th album, Disco, is a set of streamlined, retro-style, glitterball dance pop created in quarantine conditions, with the star dragging duvets and blankets around her London flat to build a sound booth and record her own vocals. “I thought if 11-year-olds can do this in their bedroom, I can figure this out,” she said in a recent Billboard interview, erview, in which the 52-year-old year-old geeks out about out microphone models dels (she favours the Brauner VMX, apparently). parently). “It’s good to add new skills to your ur set.”
That spirit of pluck and determination ermination is a huge part of Kylie’s career eer longevity. gevity. She has s enjoyed an extraordinarily raordinarily long run n for an artist rooted oted in fizzy, hooky, oky, danceoriented ented pop, surely ely the most competitive mpetitive and youth-fixated uth-fixated of all musical genres. nres. Almost all her Eighties contemporaries had been relegated to package nostalgia tours long before Kylie was serenaded at Glastonbury last year. Back in 1987, who could have imagined 200,000 festival revellers singing g g cheesy europop smash I Should Be So Lucky as if it was an eternal classic?
Like most great pop stars, Kylie’s appeal is as much personal as musical. Of course, it helps that she is gorgeous, and has dazzled us with an endless parade of hot pants and headdresses. But her secret weapon has been a spirit of joy that has kept us avidly following her travails through cancer, chemotherapy and broken engagements, taking heart when she bounces back smiling.
So who better to lead us on to the dancefloor in these dark hours when nightclubs have closed their doors doors? “Now that it’s kitchen disco for most of us, you have to create your own world,” according t to Kylie. Crafted with a team of the usual journeyme journeymen SwedishAmerican p producers and programm programmers sending digital files back and forth via th the magic of the internet, D Disco offers a set of famil familiar grooves. The theme is love on the dancefloor dancefloor, driven by slick Chic guitar guitars and gilded with the sy syncopated parps of synthetic Motown horns and w washes of make-belie make-believe Philadelphia strings.
It is uplif uplifting, spirited, sweet, and all in good fun, even if the tone is a bit more cut pr price cocktails at a high street nightspot than champagne on ice at Studio 54. Only witty late-night anthem Where Does the DJ Go? and daring time-shifter Dance Floor Darling offer the kind of surprises that might make dancers skip a beat.
Kylie’s soft, pinched vocals remain perennially airy and girlish. Even in middle age, she has acquired none of the imperial emotion of a genuine disco diva. Her comfort zone is effervescence and escapism, in the pursuit of which Disco stays light on its feet and easy on the ear. We’ve heard it all before, but Kylie has the floor and, honestly, she sounds like she’s having a ( glitter)ball.
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