Review of Kylie Minogue’s album “Tension”

Australian singer Kylie Minogue first took to the stage more than 35 years ago and has proven herself to be one of the world’s superstars throughout the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and now into the 2020s. Her new album “Tension” uses the achievements of all five decades and that is why it was met with admiration from the public and critics, she believes Igor Gavrilov.

The success of Kylie Minogue’s single “Padam Padam”, released in June 2023, confirmed Kylie Minogue’s phenomenal status in popular music. The white singer, whose song first hit No. 1 in the UK charts in 1987, eventually took “Padam Padam” to No. 8 on the main UK singles chart, No. 5 on the dance chart and No. 1 on the UK Indie chart alone.

While the sound of “Padam Padam” was described as “hypnotic electro” with elements of dark synth-pop “inspired by Eastern Europe”, the other single that preceded the release of Tension, “10 Out Of Ten”, was more along the lines of the usual English pop of the 1980s, an important component of which was a reasonable male voice, reminiscent of Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys (and this despite the fact that the Dutch DJ Oliver Heldens, who was responsible for the sound in “10 Out Of Ten”, was not in the 80s) .

The third single, “Tension”, was created by a team of producers, which, along with Kylie Minogue, included Englishmen Biff Stannard, Duck Blackwell, John Green and Camilla Purcell. Actually, with the exception of “Padam Padam” and “10 Out Of Ten”, these musicians wrote almost the entire body of music included in the “Tension” album. The title track of the disc is inspired by house music of the 1990s. This applies primarily to the main keyboard stroke. The rest is a straightforward and unmistakable set of dance-pop clichés, in which the thin pioneering voice of 55-year-old Minogue, sometimes processed with a vocoder, feels habitually comfortable.

According to most commentators, in the album “Tension” Kylie Minogue moved away from the style of the previous album “Disco” (2020). She moved away, but not far. It’s just that if in the track “Hold On Tonight” the production team gives disco a rave scale of later eras, and in “You Still Get Me High” it recalls what they danced to in the 1980s, then in “Hands” there is a hint of early rap, and “Things We Do For Love” features ABBA melodies. Kylie Minogue’s fidelity to 1980s radio-friendly pop music is best heard in “Green Light,” which features a majestic saxophone arrangement.

Despite the candy blonde image that has always been characteristic of Kylie Minogue, except, perhaps, for a short period of flirting with indie in the mid-1990s, in the new album she has a sincere human dimension, and she has not changed this for many years. If you look back at the singer’s almost forty years of career, it turns out that she never tried to seem better than she really was. She does not hide her age, rather she is proud of it, continuing her crazy dances on stage and in videos. And she didn’t hide her illnesses either; on the contrary, she put them at the service of both her own career and her public. It is believed that thanks to her revelations about the fight against breast cancer, women began to undergo examinations with oncologists more often.

Despite the fact that the Tension album evokes the feeling of something already heard once, Kylie Minogue does not try to pass off her songs as artistic discoveries. A disco is a place where it is better not to change anything unnecessarily, because what is there already works well. However, in the clips, lyric videos and visualizers illustrating the music from the album, the theme of summing up, albeit preliminary, still flashes from time to time. Among a series of spectacular dresses, in the sparkle of tinsel, in the flickering of light and music, the glance of a woman, tired not so much of dancing as of surprising and competing, flashes through. In this sense, the micro-budget video for the song “You Still Get Me High” is very strange and at the same time logical. In the song itself, the slow chorus gives way to a dynamic part, but Kylie is still sitting on the hotel bed, not breaking into a dance. It is enough for her to be alone with herself at this moment and sing as if no one sees or hears.

The essence of pop music discovered by English musicians in the 1980s still fuels the music market today. Last year, Soft Cell and Duran Duran had breakthrough albums, this year Depeche Mode released their long-awaited disc, and Pet Shop Boys went on tour. Fans of The Cure are waiting for the long-promised new record of their idols, and in the meantime Duran Duran have added an entire album’s worth of new songs. Operating exclusively with tried and tested means that are well known to the public, the artists of the great era in the era of TikTok remain in the big league. Perhaps it’s all about the same feeling of music made by living people that their new songs convey. You see it less often among young people.