Jark
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- Joined
- Oct 27, 2007
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Are you ready bitches?
TRAVEL IN LIGHT YEARS...
If it's true that to qualify as a legendary pop diva you need to make at least one major comeback at some point in your career - usually a few years after people start to talk about you like you're history or, worse still, stop talking about you at all - then Kylie was thirteen years deep into an already impressive and varied musical career when she finally earned that place at the table. In 1998, when her left-field, artistically-awakened but commercially-sleepy sixth record Impossible Princess left the few charts it impacted (in Europe, it did nothing at all) just weeks after its arrival, it might've been tempting for critics to imagine that Kylie's career would either cease to exist or, at the very least, shapeshift into something quite different.
She chose the latter.
Returning a few months into the new millennium, Kylie came to the party with a better wardrobe and a new direction - and, maybe most crucially, a new record label. Parlophone A&R Jamie Nelson steered Kylie back into the mainstream pop scene she'd left behind at the beginning of the '90s, updating her sound with references from nu-disco and French house a year before Daft Punk's Discovery became a global smash. If the cheerful pop bombast of SAW which had once defined Kylie's sound seemed wildly dated in the Y2K, a host of new producers, from Johnny Douglas to Guy Chambers and the Spice Girls' hitmaker Biff Stannard, created a sexier, most playful sonic sandbox for her to play in; the new sound, marrying sleek electronic house (On A Night Like This, Light Years) with more retro homages to eras past (Loveboat, Spinning Around), fit Ms Minogue as snugly as the gold hot pants which made instant Kylie fans of a million dads. More notably still, it played directly into the tastes of Kylie's sizeable gay fanbase, soundtracking Saturday nights on local dancefloors for the entire of the year 2000, and earning a loyalty that would last far longer.
From Spinning Around onwards, the Light Years campaign played out as smoothly as any other successful, image-remaking comeback you can call to mind, giving Kylie four UK top 10s and two #1s in her native Oz - her first since Confide In Me six years earlier. In 2000, as in 1994, Kylie surprised everyone who had thought it reasonable to consign her to history - and this time, she was just getting started.
FEEL THE FEVER.
Clearly energised by the widespread success of Light Years, Kylie demonstrated her hunger to remain on top by returning with a new album exactly one year later. Where its predecessor cast its web across a wide range of dance-pop sub-genres, Fever streamlined Kylie's sound, filtering out most of the retro elements - only its opening track nods to the disco of decades gone by - to create a record that was tighter, more concise, and considerably more futuristic. This is sci-fi-leaning electropop at its sleekest, with the joyous bounce of much of Light Years replaced by a robotic, mechanical approach to both the music (Kylie's voice frequently swims under a cool layer of vocoder) and the choreography of the videos (Kylie and dancers obeying their programming to a T in sparse, post-apocalyptic renderings of a distant metropolis).
Which is not to say that Fever is a cold record from front to back - far from it. There's a real sensuality to opener More More More, Love At First Sight bottles the ecstasy of the feeling, and both Your Love and Dancefloor sound like a disco on a rooftop at the cusp of sunset. But the overriding sensation of Fever is something more ritualistic - dancing because that's all there is. On both the deliciously repetitive hook of Can't Get You Out of My Head, the ice-cold European megasmash that entered the collective conscience and immediately cemented Kylie as one of the all-time greats, and the dark alluring In Your Eyes, movement feels mandated, as if some shadow government has religiously choreographed the lives of its citizens to prevent any ideas of rebellion creeping into the collective psyche. And perhaps Fever lays out its thesis most clearly on the title track, with a confession and a question: "I can't help but need this drug / Don't you feel the fever like I do?" In the future, the disco has become the prison and the means of escape.
Certified platinum or multi-platinum in various countries globally and even breaking Kylie into America, briefly, Fever was the sound of an artist gone stratospheric.
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It's all properly socially distanced and responsible.
i use an amazing online software that has everything, I just choose images and basically CURATE with an AESTHETIC EYE. I don't want to oversell my talents here 
