Review Summary: Eleven down, how many more to go?
Stuart Price of recent
Scissor Sisters fame, his wide-ranging production team and their collective effort spawn plenty emblematic dance-pop driven tunes across
Aphrodite’s twelve instalments. There’s no doubt that Kylie, regardless of who’s assembling her music, is still one of the hardest working pop queens still breaking the dance floor. Even if significance has gradually waned since 2000’s
Light Years,
Aphrodite supplements resilience in more ways than one – much more than
X’s painstaking stabs in the dark. In comparison, the melodious
“Closer” and its successor,
“Everything is Beautiful” are as leisurely as it all gets, with the rest clinging to wee small hours but completely familiar uptempo dance floor estate. Others like
“Too Much”, which remarkably introduces the seemingly forgotten art of pinging polyrhythms, and
“Illusion” offer a characteristic Kylie with no gimmickry, but don’t answer the ultimate matter of Price’s occasional dubious reduced-to-clear production style. The marriage between her voice, and his synthetic strings, and average bouncing beats is where its success will be measured given its generally simplistic structure; lead anchor (
“All the Lovers”), and three or four winners bisected by a remainder harboured between the featureless (
“Cupid Boy”/
“Can’t Beat the Feeling”) and the more tolerable (
“Get Outta My Way”/
“Better Than Today”).
These all may be blips on the radar of the current pop megalomania, but all the more vital is for Kylie to show coherence to be deemed a success by her fans, and in this case a listener not so much concerned with overstated flamboyancy and more about how long before the budgie-birdie vox is just too much to handle. The choice to supplant the sentiment from 2003’s
Body Language with a more synthetic sensitivity will most certainly impede the album’s long term impetus. Playing safe, while generally undesired, is all about a veteran could be asked of in the current pop climate. However, regardless of this, from a fan’s perspective, nothing could really be any better, as everything here at least strikes the catchy, cluey and clever aura Kylie so eloquently suggests amidst her musical colour.
