SMI New Music Preview: Kylie Minogue – Kiss Me Once

By Alicia Kamenick on April 11, 2014@corianderstem

Sparkly Australian pop sprite Kylie Minogue knows her audience, and always brings a decent collection of shiny dance pop. Collaborating with the ubiquitous Sia and Pharrell Williams (among others), her new album Kiss Me Once mostly delivers the goods.

Opener “Into the Blue” is a highlight, as is the Pharrell-produced “I Was Gonna Cancel,” with its disco shimmer.

Like many Kylie albums, however, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of her songs veer towards silly, but she’s always in on the joke, tongue firmly in cheek. However, three songs here with “sex” in the titles are a trifecta of . . . well, a trifecta of NO. Sia-penned and dubstep-tinged “Sexercise” is especially cringe-worthy, veering so far into ridiculous that it turns the corner to annoying.

Aside from those three, and the sappy Enrique Iglesias duet “Beautiful,” the album has enough fabulously-produced dance pop songs to satisfy fans of the genre.

Alicia is a Midwest transplant who loves Seattle but misses thunderstorms. Her musical obsessions began when her coolest aunt gave her a copy of K-Tel’s Rock 80 album for Christmas when she was 7. She spent many years studying piano and voice, but the force of rock and roll won, so while she still sings in a local chorale, her true musical passions lie more with The Beatles than with Beethoven. When she’s not working at her job in HR, she can be found singing bad pop songs at the top of her lungs … although sometimes she does that