Relisten #4: Light Years & Fever (TONIGHT 7.30pm)

Don't forget to tag on 'Password' to the end of Light Years.

I think it might be best to shift Fever forward a bit no?

I mean what about 'Ocean Blue' and 'Paper Dolls'??


Password is on the standard Spotify version anyway, so I'd be inclined to leave it. The others I'd personally prefer to leave for the bonus round, just because there are quite a few this time around.
 
Password is on the standard Spotify version anyway, so I'd be inclined to leave it. The others I'd personally prefer to leave for the bonus round, just because there are quite a few this time around.
Sorry yah just noticed that it's also been advertised regionally, nationally & internationally. Oh my goodness.

Stage fright. Will we have to behave ourselves?
 
Will we have to stutter the initial play of Password to simulate skipping backwards on the CD player?
 
Because I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU but I don’t enjoy the track otherwise.
 
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.


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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.
 
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Our clocks went back at the weekend. Still waiting for an hour...
 
I'll be sticking to the Spotify link Jark posted and having Password at the end, anyway. I hope that's not too controversial...
 
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).

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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 darkly 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.
 
Are we starting Light Years with Spinning Around? Sorry if that was covered already!
 
I'm doing video editing stuff this evening so will be listening along but probably not too CHATTY
 
This is a slower song than it is in my head. I must be used to hearing it beat matched up a bit.
 
I've noticed a bit of nonchalance towards Spinning Around in recent years from the fanbase. Which I can't understand AT ALL - to me this is absolute peak Kylie and it's aged SO WELL.

The meta lyricism establishing her comeback, the gorgeous hooks, the easy joyousness of it at all... a gift of a song and easily Kylie top 10.

10 Spinning Around
 
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I haven't listened to the album in whole for ages - so excited to hear DISCO DOWN again.
 
I never seem to think of On A Night Like This as a personal favourite but when it's on GOD it really CUMS ALL OVER YOUR TITS! :disco:

A song I would very much like to hear on a messy night out, which makes me think that quite possibly my only option is to go one of the hun @monsta's legendary club nights :disco:

10 Spinning Around
10 On A Night Like This
 
“Spinning Around” would be as big in 2020 and holds up better than most of the pop from that era. truly a defining record if CGYOOMH didn’t exist...
 

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