Review Summary: A Fun, Goofy, Campy, Transitional Album That Was (Not Quite Light) Years Ahead of Its Time
Like many artists with sustained careers, the story of Kylie Minogue is one of consistent reinvention. Her career began in the late 80s as a pretty-faced puppet for the hit-making trio of Stock-Aitken-Waterman. The quartet of albums she made under them are entirely forgettable pop of the most superficial variety. Her proper debut came in '94 with her superb
Self-Titled album. Though her songwriting role was still minimal with only one credit, she was able to choose her songwriters and producers, and it showed in the mature mix of contemporary styles. Her creative peak came with '97's
Impossible Princess. One of the best, and most underrated, albums of the 90s,
Impossible Princess found Minogue stretching her songwriting wings and collaborating with a diverse range of songwriters and producers, with the result being a glorious and heterogeneous mix of 90s musical styles. There was only one problem with
Impossible Princess; it was a commercial flop and critically controversial. Fans apparently didn't like Minogue as an experimental, moody, alternative dance/rock queen. So, like any commercially conscious diva, Minogue did a 180 for her next album,
Light Years.
It's difficult to stress just how much of a polar opposite
Light Years is from its two predecessors. Even in retrospect it seems an utterly weird entry in Minogue's discography, if not one of the weirdest albums of the early-aughts. Tonally, it's clear the Minogue has moved away from the darker, atmospheric pop of tracks like
Confide in Me and
Too Much and towards the bright, happy, party side of pop. Musically, Minogue has ditched most all traces of alternative rock, R&B, trip-hop, new jack swing, techno, and most of the other 90s genres. In its place is, of all things, disco. Two tracks make direct references to the genre (
Disco Down and
Your Disco Needs You), but its lead singles (
Spinning Around and
On a Night Like This) were clearly influenced by disco's distinctive four-on-the-floor rhythm. More interesting than the (indirect) influence is the pastiche of 70s disco in songs like
So Now Goodbye (listen to those strings and piano-accompanied rhythm!) and
Loveboat. Even without the retro context, it's hard to imagine many pop divas having the guts to release such ostensibly silly songs like
Loveboat and
Your Disco Needs You, which are equally likely to elicit groans or smiles from listeners depending on their tolerances for camp.
It's always tempting to say that when artists so radically change styles, especially after commercial failures, and super-especially if they go from something dark-and-moody to something bright-and-fun, that it was merely a desperate attempt at commercial success at the expense of artistry.
Light Years is an album that turns these assumptions on their head. Despite the fact that both Minogue's S/T album and
Impossible Princess were her artistic peak, they were also far more in-line with the musical styles of their time; both albums
sound like the 90s. On the other hand, you'd be hard-pressed to find an album like
Light Years in the decade before its release. Though Daft Punk was clearly influential in bringing French house (a clear precursor to nu-disco) to the mainstream in the late 90s with tracks like
One More Time and their album
Homework, nobody had fully embraced the genre the way Minogue did on
Light Years. Since its release, nu-disco has pervaded mainstream pop. Madonna's 2005
Confessions on a Dance Floor was perhaps the second album to fully embrace the genre. Lady Gaga's early albums abused the hell out of disco rhythms (if not always the rest of the genre's trappings). By the '10s nearly every major pop artist--Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, Robin Thicke, Beyonce, Katy Perry--had taken their shots at the genre, and even indie-rock darlings like The Arcade Fire had tried their hand at it on
Reflektor. The trend continues to this day where you can hear it on tracks like Carly Rae Jepsen's
Julien from her latest album,
Dedicated.
Of course, influence means little if the music itself isn't good. Thankfully, Light Years is a great, if uneven, album. Like most pop, it's entirely front-loaded with most all of the highlights contained in the first half. Besides all of the aforementioned disco tracks--which are all at the very least pure, unadulterated fun--one of the album's highlights, and one of the highlights of Minogue's discography, is
Kookachoo. Though not disco, it is entirely retro; a convincing throwback to 60s pop down to the groovy bass riff, old-school guitar tone, sitar, wide range of keyboard sound effects, and "ba baba ba" harmonies in the chorus. I dare anyone to listen to this track without grinning ear-to-ear. Unfortunately, the album's second half instantly dips in quality and rarely recovers:
Please Stay,
Under the Influence of Love and
Butterfly are bland, repetitive dance pop;
Bittersweet Goodbye is a cloying, saccharine ballad.
I'm So High recovers somewhat thanks to its subtle, laid-back, slowly-building melody. The real highlight of the album's second half is
Kids, though it sounds more like a leftover from
Impossible Princess with its funky verse rhythms and distorted, guitar-driven chorus. The closing title track, while minimal, repetitive, and musically dull, is also quietly moody in a way that the rest of the album was lacking in.
After
Light Years Kylie would finally hit the commercial jackpot with 2001's
Fever.
Fever remains Kylie's best album of her pure dance-pop phase, while
Impossible Princess and her
Self-Titled remain her best albums from an artistic standpoint. Meanwhile,
Light Years is the transitional black-sheep album that broke ties with its predecessors and obliquely predicted the direction Kylie would be going in, all while resurrecting a long-dead genre, quietly influencing nearly two decades of pop music, and sounding utterly unique (even in the wake of its successors) while doing so. Despite the fact that the album's second half couldn't maintain the momentum of the first, you'd be hard-pressed to find many "3.5" albums that did half as much, which makes this album far more interesting than my rating perhaps suggests.
