- If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the road to Nashville, TN is paved with gold. The number of artists who have slung their hook in the capital of country music, while not being from that fraternity originally, is innumerable. Only recently, one of Australia’s more recent pop-princesses, Dami Im, visited Nashville for her latest outing, hoping for some of that musical magic glitter to sparkle her way.
Golden is Kylie Minogue's fourteenth album from a near thirty year career and fifty year life-span (hence the title of the album), and is her first album in eight years to top both Australian and UK charts, so the fans and the casual listener must be hearing something they like. Earlier this year, Minogue surprised all and sundry with the first single from the album (and first track on this album), Dancing, which veered head-first in to country-pop territory that once was the happy hunting ground of people like Taylor Swift. Though Minogue has been quick to claim her “spirit animal” for Golden is the queen of country-pop-MOR, Dolly Parton. And Dolly’s bright vocal style, hand-claps, brisk guitar and rhythm section work is everywhere on Golden.
Dancing also borrows from Minogue’s own back catalogue as a dance-diva as well. There are enough claps and clicks to get the most recalcitrant foot a’tapping. Moving on to the second single Stop Me From Falling, it ups the ante, a bit like a scene in a classic western where the poker game goes high-stakes with one player dropping all their chips into the centre of the table. By now, Minogue either has charmed you with even more hand-claps, sweet harmonic cooing from the backing singers and a driving beat that will defy any attempts not to move in synch, or you are clinically dead.
That driving beat, in the form of hand claps (real or programmed) and finger clicks (ditto), are the over-arching sound of the album, perhaps conveying the impression to the listener that, “howdy, y’all, I made this ‘ere record in Nashville”. It does get a little tiring, and there are a couple of tracks that don’t seem to be too happy to have the “country-thang” done to them, the very disco Raining Glitter, which, to be fair, is somewhat better than the downright confused Lifetime To Repair which starts as an almost hillbilly guitar picking “aw-shucks” lament about Minogue’s well publicised love-life disasters and then morphs into a disco stomp chorus and neither the verse and the chorus can find a moment to really knit back together.
Minogue has a Madonna like control over this album, serving as executive producer and co-author of every song (twelve on the standard, sixteen on the deluxe issue). Golden does have a single minded pursuit – make this sound “country”, and she employs a dozen producers (some working in teams) to workshop a Nashville flavoured dance-pop release.
Given that Minogue started the album for her new label BMG as another one of her regular dance-pop efforts, it’s at least praiseworthy she was able to go along a different path that may help extend her career further into the future, rather like her 1997 Impossible Princess album did, by using sounds and styles that were unfamiliar, then, to her and her fans, and gave her a rejuvenation that many performers sadly miss in their careers. It’s unlikely that her next album will follow the same path as this one, though, if history repeats, then Minogue fans are in for a real treat, as Impossible Princess was succeeded by Light Years and Fever which contain some of her most memorable and well-crafted dance-pop anthems.
- Blair Martin.