It's discouraging, as a critic, to pick up an assigned album and see a track listing that includes "In Your Eyes," "Fever" and "Fragile." And it's not a cover album. In this case it's Kylie Minogue's "Fever," a dance album as unoriginal as its lifted song titles.
Minogue is as inexplicably unavoidable in the U.K. and her native Australia as Britney Spears is in the United States, but aside from the slight success of a throwaway recording of "The Loco-motion" over a decade ago, she has never broken though stateside. It's too bad for Spears, at least, who could have learned a thing about culling a long-term career out of the airborne particles of transient pop music.
Like Spears, Minogue was the pretty, fresh teenaged face who regurgitated the platitudinous and coyly suggestive lyrics written for her until she simply couldn't take it anymore and had to have artistic control over the platitudinous and coyly suggestive lyrics herself. Now in her early 30s, Minogue still makes bland, critically reviled music to the delight of millions.
"Fever" bolts out of the starting gates with the breathy vocals and bouncy techno of "More, More, More" and skids to a halt about 45 minutes later. The music is so innocuously danceable and utterly forgettable that you feel like it should be piped over the P.A. at Old Navy. Wow, isn't shopping fun?
The Old Navy comparison holds true even further. You shop at Old Navy not because of the quality of the clothes. Simply put, the clothes are cheap and trendy. Old Navy never presents itself as anything else. Cheap. Trendy. Got it.
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So it goes with "Fever." The album is so slick that the ink from the "guilty pleasure" stamp still is running down the sides and gathering in little sticky puddles at your feet. And Minogue's lyrics are so insincere that they bounce back to sincere, overshoot and end up back at insincere again, to paraphrase "Ghost World."
The saving grace of "Fever" is its self-awareness. The songs are dumb. Who cares - let's dance! "On the dance floor / I'm gonna lose it in the music," Minogue sings on the predictably titled "Dance Floor." At her best, Minogue demands the listener's attention when it has wandered to the other nearby gyrating bodies. "Give it / Give it to / Give to me like I want it!" she orders on "Give It To Me" (natch).
"Give It To Me" is far and away the best of the bunch, with a surprisingly sliding melody line and a fist-pumping chorus recalling the best of Prince, where the vocals aren't upstaged by the high-tech bleeps and pongs that pepper the background. "I need a shot of love / 'Cuz I've got a bad, bad habit," Minogue cries, and for once you believe her.
While we're at it, "Fragile" isn't bad either, all skating melody and subtle technology. Nor is "Can't Get You Out Of My Head," despite the ostentation of its "na, na, na" hook and the indolence of its repetitive lyrics.
But "Fever" is not an album that is meant to be listened to. It should be on in the background while you go about the business of living it up.
Despite the prevalence of technology, the production itself is essentially lazy. Mindnumbingly redundant drum loops spiked by the occasional beep or whizz serve as the backbone of "Fever." Thankfully, Minogue mostly resists the temptation of the voice effects box, with the unfortunate exception of "Burning Up." (Chorus - you guessed it: "I'm burning up, baby / Burning up.")
Minogue is a better singer than Jennifer Lopez or Janet Jackson, but it's hard to imagine her pulling off a ballad that requires any real vocal flexibility. She's too smart to attempt that - and so "Fever" is all sparkle and no substance.
Citizens of the U.K. and Australia are on a first-name basis with Minogue, and demand for magazines featuring her cool supermodel's gaze on the cover are guaranteed to surpass supply. It's simply inexplicable, but so is America's obsession with our own pop tarts.
"Fever" won't do much for Minogue's American ambitions, in this critic's crystal ball. Inundated as we are with unaccountably adored pop acts, there just isn't room for another who hasn't got a significantly novel gimmick to offer - especially an artist that already enjoys such widespread international fame.
Americans like to be the discovers of their own sensations, and Minogue missed that chance 15 years ago.
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