In decades gone by, it used to be commonplace to marvel at how pop divas reinvented themselves. Back then, a new Madonna hairdo signalled a tectonic cultural shift. When Kylie went from being an Antipodean chart moppet to a Nick Cave duettee, when she raunched up her image from girl next door to SexKylie, it seemed to mean something vast for popular culture.
Now we are all wiser. We know that in pop, as in life, change is not only constant, it’s the only constant. Pop stars tweak their sound every album cycle; they reboot their image just slightly less often than your browser refreshes. It all doesn’t mean so much, so long as the new tunes resonate. Welcome, then, to the 19th (or so) coming of Kylie, in which she throws her diamonds in the air (metaphorically speaking) while swinging in a big red chair. She’s 45. You really can’t tell.
Polished but kittenish, Kiss Me Once remains true to the effervescent dance-pop for which Kylie is known. But the scenery around this album has altered profoundly. After 25 years with the manager who took her on after Aussie soap opera Neighbours, Kylie is now looked after by Roc Nation (ultimate boss: Jay Z; day-to-day manager: same guy as Rihanna; Roc artists show their love for ‘the Roc’ by making a diamond with their hands; Kylie has yet to be captured doing it as Grimes has). Handily, this Roc hook-up has led to one utterly great song being on KMO that would not have been there otherwise.
I Was Gonna Cancel brings the best out of Pharrell Williams’s aerated funk-pop and slots in Kylie’s effortless disco vocal. It’s a perfect fit. And if the chorus just consists of one word (‘go!’), then the peculiar operatic angels cooing in the distance make this a winningly idiosyncratic move. (Apparently, she really was going to cancel Pharrell.)
If Williams is a ‘pro’, there is a con to the Roc. KMO’s contemporary American slant adds up to a handful of anonymous RB filler tracks with ‘sex’ in the title. Case in point: Rubberysub-bass on the misfiring Sexercise, which belies a need to keep up with EDM’s digital libidinousness. It’s so raunchy, it could just be an in-joke cooked up between Kylie and Sia Furler (who wrote the song, and exec-produced KMO). Lyrics such as ‘feel the burn’ suggest an STD, not ecstasy.
Sheer pop perfection is some way off, then. For every Les Sex (a camp winner that recalls Lady Gaga) or Million Miles (a dance-pop cut with Kylie at her most feline on the verses), there is a failed experiment such as If Only. “I turned around and the whole world spun for me,” sings Kylie with a wink (remember 2000’s Spinning Around?). The song is let down by white-hot producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Haim, Sky Ferreira), who throws fast-cut digital wobbles at La Minogue in an effort to add misplaced edge to the song’s romance. The less said about the Enrique Iglesias duet the better.
Ultimately, what matters here is not so much the exact ratio of hot to cold in Kiss Me Once’s thermostatic mixer valve, but the feel of Kylie’s famous bottom on a certain chair. She is now a judge on The Voice UK, and 6.7 million cross-generational pairs of eyes watch her charm her way through primetime. Kiss Me Once sings to them: It’s contemporary enough for the 2014 marketplace, but classy enough to maintain the clout of an improbably evergreen pop diva.
