X doubles as album rating

Twenty years after the locomotion, Kylie still hasn’t got a clue.

By Kelsey Whipple

Published Feb. 15, 2008

Kylie Minogue’s efforts to be taken seriously are hindered by the fact that her career hinged on doing what any self-respecting pop star wouldn’t: the locomotion. Flash forward 20 years, and the world’s most unsettlingly peppy 39-year-old is still at it, playing the power-pop major leagues like an Aussie possessed by the ghost of disco. The only thing serious about Kylie is her medical history, a recent battle with cancer you won’t find mentioned in any of the 13 tracks on her latest album because, well, you can’t dance to cancer.

If Kylie’s current lot in life is to be consistently one-upped by Madonna, she has her reliance on rent-a-pop to blame. Ten albums in, Kylie remains a strange kind of diva: a little too sexy to be the girl-next-door but a little too giddy to smite the comparison. X, the former soap star’s latest, is an album not unlike its creator, its roots so deep in sex its title could double as a rating. (Note: You can dance to sex.)

If they’re about anything, her songs more often than not lock in on what would appear to be her favorite pastime. X’s 13 tracks wade from sappy to sloppy, their choruses built on shamelessly sex-centric lyrics the pop tart treats like so many excuses to moan.

Kylie has drunk too much from club culture, and the results, like nasal low point “Wow”, are enough to make listeners sick.

Taking (and fumbling) its cue from electro-dance staples Daft Punk and Justice, “Wow” turns glitchy into clumsy while, whaddyaknow, Kylie goes for profound: “(Yeah yeah) is enough to love me baby/(Yeah yeah yeah) is enough to send me crazy/(Yeah yeah) such angelic motion/(Yeah yeah yeah) you know you’re made in heaven.” Even at its hissy-funk highpoint, the song is basically a ring tone.

X’s vapid lyrics are a perfect fit for the setting the album’s bevy of überproducers have created in kitchen-synched sound samples that, like much of the album, have been overdone before. Much like Robbie Williams and unlike, say, Madonna, Kylie owes her ascension to quasi-divadom to production and marketing, a fact betrayed in the general “She’s back, bitches” divannouncement oozing from X’s every glitter-clogged pore.

Not even the retro-Kylie earworm “2 Hearts” is saved from X’s general emotional vacancy. The song’s Scissor Sisters-sampling layers perfectly over the Aussie’s acerbic speak-singing only to fall prey to dead-end lyrics - Goldfrapp gone Britney, if you will. “Heart Beat Rock”’s staccato backbeat follows the same camp path when Kylie promises to “make your heartbeat rock,” while “The One”’s fussy insistence that we “love, her love her, love her” plays like Gwen Stefani’s worst nightmare. Fear of selling out orbits the album like a satellite.

While X’s obvious focus is on the dance floor, Kylie’s voice strains under the sound effects, unaided by categorically bottom-of-the-barrel lyrics. (“I’m deep in the dark of you/It feels like I never saw the sun/Should I shout for the rescue?”) Although her ability to make rumps bump is unchallenged, her thin voice wavers more often than it woos.

The tone is set early. As inanely catchy as the songs are, there’s not enough audible talent here to keep X from collapsing under the weight of its own raunchy clutter. The pop tart’s warts-and-all 10th-coming is a purely Kylie move — a veritable truckload of head-over-heals sap songs with hand-over-heart lyrics, doused in retro-glam and drowning in cheap sound bites. Madonna might have known what do with it, but Kylie? She hasn’t got a clue.