When Kylie Minogue didn’t match the runaway success of her previous album Fever within the first few weeks of releasing Body Language, her hometown press wrote her off.
Perhaps the first sign of the album’s perceived failure was the fact critics actually liked it.
And it is a fairly decent album.
Minogue opted to work with a different set of producers this time out, and they crafted a sound for her that was definitely more mature.
But that was the problem.
A lot of the tweens who snatched up Fever back in 2002 have gotten older and graduated to hip-hop and nü garage. The twain have grown up, albeit in different directions.
Yet something else is happening with Kylie.
Body Language practically carpet bombs ’80s reference throughout the entire album.
She quotes Lisa Lisa’s “Take You Home” on “Secret”, a song subtitled after said Lisa Lisa reference. “Red Blooded Woman” drops a bit of Dead Or Alive (“You Spin Me Around”). And “Sweet Music” goes so far as to hint at Jody Watley’s “I’m Looking for a New Love”.
Anbody remember Shalamar?
The teens, tweens and twentysomethings who made Minogue a background music staple on the WB would be far too young to remember Watley’s win as Grammy’s Best New Artist — and her subsequent obsolesence.
So who is Kylie really courting this time around?
Following this circuitous line of thinking, Minogue sounds like she’s courting the audience who first propelled her to stardom in the late 80s with a bubblegum cover of “Loco Motion”.
But it doesn’t really come out very cleverly. In fact, all of those references — Lisa Lisa, Dead or Alive, Jody Watley — are so specifically dated, they’re pretty much one-hit wonders.
A strange reference for someone lauded as the international version of Madonna in terms of career longevity.
Body Language comes across as a mixed message. The electronica-influenced production of “Slow”, “Still Standing” and “Someday” all point to an artist wanting to push the edges of her pop career box.
There’s an edginess to the album that’s meant to appeal to folks who think they’re too cool to listen to Kylie Minogue.
But the 80s references, the more difficult melodies, the lack of any real blazing single — that points to the audience not cool enough to hang out with the people who think they’re too cool to listen to Kylie Minogue.
All the while, she’s ignoring the audience that, as sales may seem to indicate, don’t seem to have much room for her in the first place. And the Kylie who appealed to that audience was damn fun and in mighty fine form.
Yeah. It’s confusing what to make of this album.
But from moment to moment, Body Language feels like mature work. Very little about it screams “radio”, but it still works within in the strict confines of pop.
Kylie just needs to focus a bit more on who’s supposed to be listening.
Man, do you need a lyric sheet to listen to this album.
As the Advocate and Pitchfork have already helpfully stated, the Hidden Cameras do a rather compelling job of linking spirituality with gay politics.
And jumping on the band’s website to read some of its lyrics, those analyses bear themselves out.
I’ll defer to these opinions. Why duplicate someone else’s analysis?
But Advocate writer Rob Chin is spot on about singer Joel Gibb’s enunciation on the Cameras’ studio debut, The Smell of Our Own. “One wishes he were miked more clearly”, Chin writes.
Uh, yeah.
Despite Gibb’s lyrical content and the Hidden Cameras’ pleasantly bizzare music, The Smell of Our Own gets predictable after a while.
The Polyphonic Spree, the Magnetic Fields and Belle and Sebastian have all been name checked when comparing the Hidden Cameras’ lush, orchestral sound to other groups.
And The Smell of Our Own delivers, indulging in strings and glockenspiels and harps and all manner of heavenly instruments.
But all the songs start off the same way — with a pulse. A chugging, eighth note pulse. Hello, Phillip Glass. Hello, Steve Reich. Even with all the orchestral flourishes, the song seem to follow the same template.
Gibb possesses a strong, clear voice, but the words — and they’re damn fine words — often get lost. When all you’re left with is the music, The Smell of Our Own is pretty repetitive.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to the album. “The Man That I Am” paints some really vivid images of alternative bedroom techniques.
But prepare to work a bit harder to cut through the unintended obfuscation on the album. It pays off.
There was a reason Pansy Division’s Total Entertainment felt like an anticipated release.
The band’s previous album, 1998’s Absurd Pop Song Romance, was an accomplished work, well-written, tightly-performed, insightful but not heavy-handed.
It was a damn good album.
But the five years between the release of Absurd Pop Song Romance and Total Entertainment pretty much diffused the momentum building up to the creation said album.
Pansy Division started out closer to being a gay version of the Dead Milkmen, riffing on gay themes in a comical manner.
History (i.e., old magazine articles) states the band’s opening slot on tours with Green Day forced it to grow up, which resulted in More Lovin’ from Our Oven and Absurd Pop Song Romance.
But Pansy Division decided to reign in that momentum, spent a few years playing locally, then set out again to record a new album.
As the parlance goes, the members have gone back to their roots. Too bad.
Total Entertainment pretty much sings to the choir. “Alpine Skiing” describes a bedroom technique that doesn’t really apply to a lesbian audience. “When He Comes Home” and “I’m Alright” imagine what Phil Spector would have done with a ’60s guy group.
And “No Protection” goes as far as believing in life after love in the chorus. Or rather life after refusing unprotected sex. Something like that.
On a few instances, Pansy Division attempts to write songs that speak more universally to the dynamics of relationship, gender matching regardless.
But “Too Many Hoops” and “Saddest Song” just don’t possess enough subtlety to address more than gay (white) men.
There are some hints of the more mature Pansy Division from half a decade back. “Spiral” is probably the only song in existence dealing with same-sex domestic violence, and “Not Good Enough” just plain burns.
The more serious material on the album is stashed closer to the end, but it takes effort to get through all the novelty to reach that point.
And novelty is fine, but Pansy Division has done it better before.
Around the time Pansy Division released Total Entertainment in summer 2003, the Advocate pointed out they were pretty much the only punk band made up of gay men.
Lesbians, on the other hand, have a pretty storied indie rock history — Team Dresch, Le Tigre, Lucsious Jackson (in part), Sleater-Kinney (ditto). There’s even a label dedicated to indie rock by lesbians — Mr. Lady Records.
As I type, I bet some enterprising college student is writing some thesis on why lesbians make better rock musicians. Not to slag Stephin Merritt or Elton John — but can you really raise a fist to their music?
With the Butchies, you can.
After three albums on Mr. Lady, the lesbian trio has moved to Yep Roc for its fourth album, Make Yr Life.
Butchies albums are pretty brisk, and Make Yr Life is no exception. From start to finish, the trio hammers each song, none clocking more than 3 1/2 minutes.
Kaia Wilson’s voice possesses the same kind of sweetness and urgency that makes Sleater-Kinney a perennial favorite. And the band is jackhammer tight.
When Wilson commands, “fake fake fake your fear” on the title track, drummer Melissa York and bassist Alison Martlew literally pound the point home.
The band doesn’t obfuscate the gay themes in their music, nor are they blatant about it. “17” paints a picture of teenage uncertainty, in which the protagonist “smokes fags with fags”.
And “She’s So Lovely” is about what the title suggests.
The only mixed bag on the album is the concluding cover of the Outfield’s “Your Love”. The slow-downed interpretation is a nice reading of the song, but after witnessing the Butchies prove its heavy mettle, it’s disappointing not to hear the band approach the song with the same bombast of the original.
(And man, would that rock if they did!)
The Butchies offer yet another notch in a growing tally of lesbian rockers, and Make Yr Life is an excellent entry. Now if only gay men could catch up.
To get a sense of Junior Senior’s D-D-Don’t Stop That Beat, listen to the first track on repeat 11 times.
Hell, you could just listen to the first track and stop right there.
Sure, that one expository track — pick any, actually; it doesn’t quite matter — is actually a pretty interesting mash-up of party rock and disco samples. And yes, that Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics sticker on the cover is very well earned.
But after a while, D-D-Don’t Stop That Beat becomes a blur, kind of like the chemical-induced party atmosphere such albums are intended to foster.
Even the B-52’s knew when to mix it up a bit.
“White Trash” comes pretty close, indulging in a garage rock sludge closer to MC5. But it comes at the very end of the album, too late to do the rest of it any good.
The bonus material tacked onto the US edition of the album only serves to reinforce Junior Senior’s homogenity. In fact, the live version of “Move Your Feet” makes it clear the band’s material works best in the studio.
To its credit, Junior Senior is something of a shining beacon out there in these times of musical uncertainty. Between all the bands trying to sound like Joy Division, Television or the Stooges, it’s nice to see Fatboy Slim’s efforts have not gone totally obsolete.
And yes, D-D-Don’t Stop That Beat is a party record, which means it’s not exactly aiming for high art.
That doesn’t excuse it from being just plain annoying after a while.
This is one one-trick pony with a really quick shelf life.
Quoting Maurice Ravel’s Bolero in the middle of the opening track on an album? That’s so gay.
But Rufus Wainwright has never really hidden that fact — that he’s a show-off.
Back in 1998, I tried to get through the first couple of tracks on his self-titled debut but couldn’t do it — Wainwright was just way too heavy-handed with his songwriting smarts.
He reigned them in for 1991’s Poses, an album on which he claims he “sold out”. But on Want One — the first of what was originally intended to be a two-volume set (again with the showing off) — he’s loosened his grip on that reign.
But not too much.
Wainwright characterizes Want as his hangover album, and there’s a lushness to it that seems measured. He’s not afraid to bring in the strings and the orchestra at the appointed dramatic climax of a song, but he isn’t obliged to get Andrew Lloyd Webber on a listener’s ass either.
Okay, maybe he does get theatrical on the 7-minute “Go or Go Ahead”, and on “Beautiful Child” and “14th Street”.
But the orchestral touches on “Movies of Myself” and “I Don’t Know What It Is” don’t overpower the songs themselves. And on “Natasha”, they suite Wainwright beautifully.
On other tracks, it’s just him and that piano. “Pretty Things” is just that.
Wainwright’s voice has gotten better, too. In the beginning, he sounded like he sipped from the same helium balloon that propelled Shiina Ringo’s singing on her debut album.
But when he lets his voice out for that big moment, he can handle himself well enough.
Want One isn’t as singles-ready as Poses — which isn’t saying much since “California” was really the only single-ready track on that album — but it does house some nice performances by Wainwright. And it’s the performance moreso than the writing that ultimately seduces.
He’s still a show-off, that Rufus Wainwright, but he’s not as precocious about it anymore.
Looking back, 69 Love Songs — it wasn’t that great.
Sure, it’s quite a feat for one person to set out to write 100 love songs, only to pare it down by 31 just so a single evening performance doesn’t stretch more than three hours.
And it’s quite amazing one person would pretty much play all the instruments and sing all 69 songs.
And of course, props must be given for sticking to a single theme for all 69 pieces of music.
But the Magnetic Fields’ 1999 epic isn’t immune to the perils of any multi-volume album — there’s a point where a writer has just gotta pad.
Five years later, it’s pretty tough to sit through even the first 23 of those 69.
i, the Magnetic Fields’ follow-up album, could have easily been considered a fourth volume of an increasingly, inaccurately named trilogy of love songs.
Thankfully, head honcho Stephin Merritt opted for a different conceit — all the song titles on the album start with the letter “I”. But all of them deal with that most versatile of themes, nonetheless: love.
So why prattle on about how much 69 Love Songs doesn’t age very well? Because i achieves better results with a fraction of the quantity.
Merritt once again lets his home studio muse apply cabaret-style writing to a myriad of genres. Hell, he even does a bit of techno (“I Thought You Were My Boyfriend”.)
Maybe it’s the major label budget, but i sounds richer than its predecessor, even though Merritt sticks to the same timbral pallette — cello, violin, guitar, banjo, ukelele and the cheapest damn sounding Kurzweil 2000 on the planet.
Better still is Merritt’s writing, which benefits from focusing on 14 tracks than 69.
“I Wish I Had an Evil Twin” indulges in some clever id fantasies, but the song’s protagonist has enough sense to admit “evil is not my cup of tea”.
The line about “ampersand and ampersand” is pretty clever on “I Don’t Believe You”, but I wonder if he really meant ellipses. (“So you quote love unquote me” is a better line.)
“Is This What They Used to Call Love” could easily be sung by a jazz singer or a Broadway performer, but Merritt places the song close to the end of the album, which heightens its drama just a bit more.
Sequencing is such a lost art.
Perhaps that’s what makes i easier to digest than 69 Love Songs — i is an album, whereas 69 Love Songs is just a songbook. There’s a better sense of direction on i, which makes all the genre-jumping seem more organic.
But not in the way her fans nor her record company would like to think.
A young, black girl from Canada, Dobson offers up a bratty snarl that draws inevitable comparrisons to her fellow countrywoman, Avril Lavigne.
Her self-titled debut is an exercise of commercial pandering, a vertible checklist of sonic wizardry geared to milk the lunch money of unsuspecting adolescents everywhere.
Watered-down punk riffs — check. Nasal vocals — check. Token ballads — check. Simplistic assertions of feminine strength — check.
Fefe Dobson is the stuff from which indier-than-thou record store employees have nightmares.
And the world needs her.
The world needs her in the same way it needs asexual gay men on network television, in the same way it needs Japanese girls in dread locks, in the same way it needs Latino guys digging Morrissey.
The world needs her because there just aren’t any black women singing in front of electric guitars. (And what about Res? She hasn’t done anything since her debut in 2001.)
Why does the world need black women singing in front of guitars? Well, why the hell not?
Why shouldn’t one of the best reggae bands in the world come from Japan? Why shouldn’t some white trash dude from Detriot be hip-hop’s most scrutinized star?
Why shouldn’t Ravi Shankar’s daughter scoop up eight Grammys for a lethargic album of countrified jazz? And what’s to stop another cello player from transcribing Jimi Hendrix’s performance of the “Star Spangled-Banner”?
Just because the brand of rock Dobson performs is as disposable as next year’s trend among 15-year-olds doesn’t mean the idea of her is without merit.
Picture it — the screech of guitars, the scream of fans, and above it all, a woman, exploiting her femininity as a weapon in a battle of the sexes, cutting clueless men down to size in the process1.
And she is black.
This color-blind dream could extend to a point where a group of young black men can find themselves tourmates with Death Cab for Cutie.
The world may not be ready for a black woman slinging a guitar. Hell, the world can’t accomodate more than one Living Colour, let alone another Pansy Division.
But what the world is ready for doesn’t reflect what it needs.
When Vernon Reid attempted to drum up support for a Black Rock Coalition more than a decade ago, it was easy to dumb down the idea of “black rock”.
Black guys who play rock music.
There weren’t many who did in the ’80s, and out of that scant number, only Fishbone and Living Colour are still around. (Never mind the fact Living Colour itself broke up in 1994 and reunited six years later.)
But as the band’s 1990 album Time’s Up demonstrated, black rock was a lot more than just black guys sligning guitars — it was about integrating, perhaps even re-integrating, black culture into rock ‘n’ roll.
Living Colour pumps up that notion on its newest album in a decade, Collideoscope.
After starting off with three heavy metallic tracks, Living Colour gets Marvin Gaye sexy on “Flying”. “Lost Halo” mixes a good dose of soul with all that distortion, while “Holly Roller” brings the band a few decades closer to the heavy blues influence of 70s rock.
Reggae works its way into the program on “Nightmare City”, while echoes of George Harrison’s dabbling with Indian music refract on “Tomorrow Never Knows”.
There’s still plenty of straight-ahead, heavy riffs to go around — “A ? of When”, “Great Expectation”, “Sacred Ground”.
But they only serve to underscore what rock music has been missing as of late — a sense of deep history.
Heavy metal may be a few generations removed from the very first combination of country and blues nearly four decades ago, but that doesn’t mean the lineage shouldn’t be traced.
Nor should it mean that it can’t be bridged.
Of course, rock music is an outgrowth of black culture in the first place, so if black rock brings black culture back into the music, what we’re really finding on Collideoscope is the completion of a circle.
It’s rather rude of me to admit it, but the main reason Kelis’ Tasty attracted my attention was because of the Neptunes.
When the people behind the glass have more cachet than the person on the front cover, something isn’t right.
But Tasty isn’t entirely the Neptunes’ show. Given the spectrum of producers who worked on the album — Dallas Austin, Raphael Saadiq, Andre 3000 of OutKast — Kelis herself deserves nods for threading together a tight album from divergent styles.
There’s a bit of something for everyone.
Austin’s rock contributions, “Trick Me” and “Keep It Down”, have been dismissed elsewhere, but both tracks are a nice contrast — like the token rock track Utada Hikaru includes on her albums.
Saadiq offers Kelis the smoothest and sexiest tracks on the album with “Glow” and “Attention”. “Marathon,” in contrast, makes for a poignant conclusion.
If anything, Andre 3000’s “Millionaire” sticks out the most. The eccentricities that powered The Love Below are only slightly toned down on this track, and he pretty much upstages Kelis throughout the song.
The Neptunes, however, provide the foundation over which Kelis pours her raspy, sultry voice. “Milkshake” may be one of those nonsense singles you’d wish would go away, but the belly-dancing slinky-ness (what an awful fake word) makes it difficult to ignore.
“Flashback” and “Protect My Heart” have drawn comparrisons to 80s R&B, against which I can’t really argue either.
Tasty is a smart album, diverse enough to keep listeners engaged, coherent enough not to drive them crazy.
And yet …
Kelis isn’t a flashy singer, which is refreshing in a genre where most singers stash 10 notes to a syllable.
While Kelis has managed to pull together a full album’s worth of strong material, there’s a nagging suspicion a little more flash would push Tasty to another level.
Kelis isn’t Mary J. Blige, but what if Blige worked with the calliber of collborators on Tasty?
The album works regardless, the least of which is a fitting title. Tasty, indeed.