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CD reviews: Kylie Minogue and more

(Filed: 15/11/2003)

This week's pop, world, jazz and folk music releases

Kylie Minogue

Body Language, Parlophone, £13.99


Dazzlingly well produced: Kylie Minogue
How could Kylie possibly follow up Fever, her bestselling last album, which featured the immensely lovable smash hit Can't Get You Out of My Head and contained barely a duff track? By trying too hard to better it, is the answer. The honorary Brit's ninth album is, on first listen, a dazzlingly well-produced collection of songs that has you grooving by default. After a couple more plays, however, it becomes evident that gee-whizz production is no substitute for decent tunes. The writing and producing talent here is phenomenal: Ms Dynamite, electro legend Curtis Mantronik, Alisha's Attic singer turned songwriter Karen Poole, and Cathy Dennis, author of Can't Get You… Yet Kylie and her team appear to have sacrificed the quality and immediacy of the songs in order to create a super-kitsch orgy of 1980s nostalgia. The current single, Slow, rewrites Je T'Aime… Moi Non Plus in the style of Kraftwerk, while Still Standing even outdoes Beck in its wholesale pastiche of 1999-era Prince. All this sounds great, but the overall result is gimmicky when it's clearly intended to be inventive. It's brave, insofar as any commercial pop record can be described that way, but this time around, the fun-sized chocolate soufflé that is Kylie has been somewhat over-egged. Lynsey Hanley