Kylie Minogue’s “Tension” Reviewed. Plus, We Rank All Her Studio Albums!
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DNA’s resident music guru and Kyliephile, Marc Andrews, on her latest album… and all the others, too!
2023 has become another of the great imperial pop phases of Kylie Minogue’s career. Padam Padam not only translated into a proper chart hit, but also became a pop-culture phrase, dance, and ubiquitous queer anthem.
As the first single from a new album, it’s a tough act to follow. Kylie has managed that before, most notably with the subsequent releases from her 2001 chart-topping album Fever. Its lead single, you may recall, was a little ditty heard around the world called Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Although none of that album’s subsequent singles managed to scale the same dizzying heights, all three became classic Kylie singles in their own right – In Your Eyes, Love At First Sight and Come Into My World.
Since 2010’s Aphrodite album – lovingly produced by the extraordinaire Stuart Price – it’s seemed as if Kylie’s been adrift from not merely making a killer album, but also killer chart-munching singles. There have been some interesting experiments (a country album, EPs with Garibay, and some non-English language duets), some classic covers (Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes and Bee Gees’ Night Fever) and one album that deserved to get more attention than it did, 2020’s Disco, truncated in its original form but extended later into a much more discofied version that was a true clubbers’ delight.
Yet all of this seemed to suggest Kylie’s time as the Princess Of Pop had passed. Would she just go on being unappreciated by the charts and those pesky kids on social media, though retaining her hardcore, ageing, gay army of lovers?
Padam Padam changed all that. A sparkly, Eurovision-esque tune with built-in “can’t get you out of my head” hooks that not only sold plenty of copies but became something of a cultural phenomenon. It went top ten in the UK – Kylie’s first to do so since 2010’s All The Lovers – and managed to break through global radio’s ageism barrier. It was also a timely reminder to everyone that Kylie is still up there with those other one-name grande dames of pop music – Madonna and Cher, let alone those young upstarts biting at her Louboutins like Taylor, Dua, Miley and Olivia.
Tension, her new album, gives Kylie a chance to expand her audience once again as a vital global pop star for the decade we’re in, not merely a pop star who was big decades ago and is only cherished for her classic hits.
The album’s second single, its title track, suggested our gal wasn’t about to play it safe or stick to a formula. Tension, much like Padam Padam, is the perfect TikTok track – it has so many different catchy bits crammed into one song that it’s only when you hear it all together you realise what a genius retro house tune with a modern twist it is. It also went top 20 as a single in the UK ahead of the album – the first time that’s happened to Kylie for 13 years and 13 years is a long time in the pop game, to be sure.
So, the question has to be asked, is there enough strong material here to grant Kylie a career for the next 20 years that will take her to Vegas (literally within weeks) and beyond? It’s already a given we’re not going to get intimate details of Kylie’s personal life, love and longings. 2018’s Golden delivered a few quiet hints at the heartache she was going through at the time of recording. Anyone looking for more than just great pop songs on 2020’s Disco would have been disappointed. She tried being an open book on 1997’s eclectic Impossible Princess album and it cost Kylie her record deal at the time. Madam Padam is one smart cookie and unlikely to let that happen twice.
What the Tension album delivers is pop music with a nod, a wink and even some not-too-old-for-sexy-stuff material. It’s glossy, polished, and you’ll feel like you know the songs even when hearing them for the first time. At times it can feel over-produced. Kylie is on board as co-writer for eight of the 11 tracks on the standard version, so that’s just as much as Kylie wants to let you have.
Like her previous all-dancing, no-crying Disco album, there is no revisiting of “ballad Kylie” here, apart from the beginning of the ethereal You Still Get Me High, courtesy of regular writing buddies Richard Stannard and Duck Blackwell, which quickly reverts to bouncy beats.
Things We Do For Love offers up a perky ’80s style groove that threatens to really soar, but ultimately never quite does. You Still Get Me High and One More Time are Kylie recycling her own noughties sound, while funky ’70s outing Green Light might have been better suited to her previous Disco set.
Hands, from a mostly Scandi-pop songwriting combo, could easily have fallen off an album from Dua Lipa or Selena Gomez (no bad thing). It also gives the impression it may have originally been intended for the Barbie movie soundtrack (Hollywood’s biggest new star gets duly name-checked), but at some point must have been nixed by studio bosses.
Oliver Heldens’ tweeny contribution, 10 Out Of 10, which failed to set the charts alight when released as a single earlier this year, has a hurried air of Kylie trying to play catchup with the kids on TikTok and Instagram. It’s catchy, but also forgettable and, well, a little beneath her.
Vegas High is a surprisingly regulation dance pop bop, though perhaps a whole slew of shimmery showgirl outfits and rainbow feather boas on stage will give it the kick it seems to be missing on record. Then there’s more pensive album closer Story, a veiled tribute to her parents, whose, “baby took the stage”, or am I reading too much into it?
Hold On To Now, with echoes of Aphrodite’s swirling dreamy pop (which Kylie previewed live in Leicester earlier this month for the BBC), is an obvious and safe third single bet. “I have a secret that I kept to myself,” Kylie declares. While it initially appears that at last we might gain an insight into Kylie’s headspace in her 55th year (“I had a walk on the wild side”), it too morphs into the formula with a strangely histrionic chorus. Once again, as has often been the criticism of La Minogue’s songs, and songwriting, over the last 20 years since her cancer diagnosis and recovery there’s been little of Kylie’s life journey in her music. It’s great pop, but missing a personal touch to make you fall in love with it, and Kylie, again.
Tension is a solid album but filled with too many generic-sounding interchangeable tunes that just aren’t up to the lofty standards of its singles, which is often the case with major pop album releases in the streaming era. Previous album Disco had a theme, better songs and a real consistency, but was hampered both by being released in the midst of a pandemic and the wrong choice of first singles. (Real Groove, Drag Race fave Supernova and Miss A Thing shoulda, coulda, woulda!)
There are three extra tracks on Tension’s deluxe version (Love Train, Just Imagine and Somebody To Love), but they’re lesser, B-side material, although the more we hear of the seductive Just Imagine the more we’re starting to change our mind. Ask us again about that one in a few weeks’ time and we’ll probably insist it should have been on the standard album in place of a number of other lesser tunes.
Some early reviewers have already deemed Tension “a good Kylie Minogue album”, but not quite up to being a great one, awarding it three out of five stars. Buoyed by its pair of outstanding singles, Tension is likely to fare better sales-wise than any Kylie album has done for some years, if not decades. If you’ve been on the journey with Kylie from the very start then this is an album that will melt your bubblegum heart to pieces.
Maybe it will be on her eventual 17th album where “our” Kylie finally allows the façade to come down, even if a teensy bit, so we can better know the woman behind the megastar. She is, after all, a breast cancer survivor, a single woman in her fifties, an expat who returned home to Australia to be close to her aging parents, a devoted Auntie and – lest we forget – a national treasure/global gay icon.
These are all great life lessons it would be great to hear more from Kylie about, so she’s more than a mere ageless pop vixen with a swag of signature hits. Then again, with 35 years of pop glory behind her, Kylie is already iconic, so perhaps having been there, done almost everything, she now just prefers to stick to what she does best – shiny happy pop – as on Tension. She hears it and she knows! 7/10
KYLIE’S SWEET SIXTEEN
All her studio albums ranked…
1 Light Years – 2000
A perfect pop record with so many memorable tunes, Kylie lyrically on form and, yes, the greatest comeback record ever!
2 Disco (Extended Mixes) – 2020
A return to form in a genre Kylie knows and loves instinctively. The extended version is unquestionably her boogie-feverish best!
3 Rhythm Of Love – 1990
Stock Aitken Waterman at their peak, plus Kylie’s first burgeoning steps as a songwriter. Its four singles have rarely been bettered… the devil you know (sorry)!
4 Aphrodite – 2010
Dusted with the production sheen and special powers of Stuart Price, this was an ebullient and glorious album that was truly for all the lovers!
5 Kylie Minogue – 1994
A great, albeit underrated and maligned, album that ripped Kylie from the teen press and delivered her to the VIP entrance of hip clubs!
6 Impossible Princess – 1997
Beloved by hardcore fans and rock critics alike, Kylie went out on a limb as never before (or since) to get truly intimate and lively!
7 Enjoy Yourself – 1989
Producers SAW in great form as Kylie shifts subtly from pop princess to dance diva. Pure enjoyment!
8 Fever – 2001
After the rush of Light Years, Kylie, the awakening artist, is brutally shoved aside for Kylie the commercially ascending global pop goddess!
9 Kylie – 1988
The first Kylie album – 35 years old this very year! – is a nostalgic gem but it’s trapped in tinny ’80s hit factory production!
10 Tension – 2023
Terrific singles (Padam Padam alone will gift Kylie another two decades of fame), but not enough killer filler and way too many generic bops!
11 X – 2007
Post-cancer diagnosis, this was a missed opportunity to let the real Kylie peek out from the Princess Of Pop facade. X, sadly, did not hit the spot!
12 Golden – 2018
A brave attempt to marry country with Kylie, using Dolly Parton as its litmus test. Its raw, sad-sack lyrics shone through the yee-ha line-dancing!
13 Body Language – 2003
Quirky, inventive and sexy, the promise of first single Slow couldn’t be sustained across a whole album, with a strong whiff of corporate meddling!
14 Let’s Get To It – 1991
Down from SAW to just SW, the magic had dimmed and the hits, too. The few bright spells were mainly the rave-tastic tracks!
15 Kiss Me Once – 2013
Sia thought she was making a Kylie record. Kylie thought she was making a Sia record. More misses than kisses!
16 Kylie Christmas – 2015
The Kylie album to play for most of December but, after the 26th, quickly relegate it to the back of the shelf!
Marc Andrews is the author of Kylie: Song By Song published by Fonthill Media. www.fonthill.media/products/kylie
