Kylie Minogue: Disco | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- If you reached for a packet of chocolate-chip biscuits on the supermarket shelf and on opening it at home, you’d be disappointed to find it containing plain water crackers; or on uncorking a fine Barossa Valley shiraz and decanting it only to discover you were about to down a less than impressive Semillon, you’d be questioning the quality of the labelling and packaging. So when clicking play on Kylie Minogue’s fifteenth studio album titled Disco, you are not expecting to get a serving of experimental grimecore or thumping death metal. And you won’t, because if there’s ever a perfect example of the phrase “does what it says on the label”, then it's these twelve tracks (sixteen on the deluxe edition): the purest form of disco-pop that’s been committed to sound files since perhaps disco’s glory days of the 1970s.

Following her interesting detour into country-pop with 2018’s Golden, Minogue is back in a genre she has mastered time and again. 2010’s Aphrodite or the 2000 release Light Years are two of her best albums, where she unashamedly essays disco and euro-dance genres with ease (Light Years alone has the camp classic Your Disco Needs You not to mention the 2001 follow-up album Fever which was a fertile period for Australia’s pop-princess). There is little to fault with Disco – it is wall-to-wall dance music from a time when lycra and spandex, glitter and spiral perms were not considered fashion crimes. Minogue embraces all that on the cover of the album, channelling fellow Australian chart topper Olivia Newton-John or “pick-a-famous-name” who would have frequented the fabled Studio 54 nightclub in Manhattan during its hedonistic hey-day in the late '70s.

There’s nary a ballad on this album – the closest Minogue gets to a slower groove is Dance Floor Darling which still stomps on like an advancing army (particularly with the tempo change in the last forty-five seconds of the track), and the album’s first single, the uplifting anthem Say Something which is just as perfect a mid-tempo dance/pop song as you can get. The rest of the album will keep the most jaded foot at least tapping, but the call to the dance floor is irresistible. Celebrate You, I Love It, Miss A Thing and Real Groove are classic disco tracks – swirling string arrangements (in reality all created via keyboards and samplers), hand claps (ditto), and the Nile Rodgers' style of lead and rhythm guitar playing permeate each one of these tracks.

The production and writing duties are shared around what seems to be a cast of thousands, too many to name individually in this review, however what is notable is that Minogue has undertaken a lot of the engineering and production herself, brought about by 2020’s great DIY movement – lockdown and COVID-enforced isolation. This could have produced an album that resembles a November 2020 Donald Trump Tweetstorm (that is, a garish mess), however, it steers clear of that possibility. One of the freshest tracks is Monday Blues that takes the Florida disco sound – all tropical and party, party, party. The following track Supernova is a ripe piece of late '70's Eurodisco, right down to the vocoder vocal effects and the unrelenting beat.

A couple of months ago Róisín Murphy dropped her homage to the classic disco age with Róisín Machine and while that is perhaps the finer album of longer form dance styles rooted in the carefree+ '70s, Minogue has created the ultimate escapist fantasy with Disco. Not only is it a reaction to the devastation the pandemic has wrought on the entire clubbing scene, it also creates for the listener a place to run away to where the mirror ball is spinning, glitter sparkles in every direction and the euphoria that classy, if cheesy, disco music can induce uplifts the spirit out of the mind-numbing drudge that 2020 gifted everyone on the planet.

- Blair Martin.
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