Kylie Minogue - Golden

Kylie Minogue
Golden
2018
Spotify

It's hard to remember a time when Kylie Minogue was not somewhat ever present in pop music. The woman never ages and still puts out bop after bop after over 30 years of being a superstar. She's gone from techno to dance and damn near everywhere in between but on this new album we get a new Kylie, Country Kylie. You read that correctly the gal from down under is taking herself to Nashville with this new record, a blend of country and dance that is awkward as all hell. Going in I was willing to give this record the benefit of the doubt because Minogue tends to have a way of surprising you when you expect the worst. However this record has absolutely none of that. If you take some country music, put it through a DJ both then record what comes out that is basically what you have on this record. The country aspects feels shoe-horned in, devoid of any respect for the genre and hoping that country fans are dumb enough to just want a dance record that vaguely sounds like their other records. You see this in country music all the time, carpet-baggers coming in and trying to bank on the massive audience, Nelly and Hootie to name a couple, but Kylie is so unconcerned with what the genre is supposed to be about it's absolutely laughable. For her to make songs like "Shelby 68", "Rollin" and "Low Blow" just makes you scratch your head because not only does she know nothing about these topics, her singing about them sounds fucking stupid. This record is pandering at the highest level.

Even Kylie sounds uninterested throughout the record, and of course she does, she has no connection to this music at all. She says the kickdrum sounds like a heart beat on "Radio On" and it feels like it should have been a totally different song that they just manipulated into something vaguely country. When Kylie's true nature slips through and her Dance-pop nature starts to take over, like on "Raining Glitter", you can feel what she is truly good at, which makes the misses on this album so profound. It is just an absolute mess from start to finish. Golden really feels like a joke, some kind of absurd comedy, but it is actually real. This thing could have been thrown together in a couple of days on a  whim for all we know because it feels like so little care was placed into these tracks. Kylie can't even fully buy in shifting style track over track and even abandoning the country all together on songs like "Lost Without You" and "Every Little Part of Me" and instead siding with a more big room EDM style. I'd like to say something nice and I highly doubt this will be a permanent switch in style for Kylie, but this record fucking sucks and is mostly just annoying and frustrating. Take my advice and avoid this record, unless you like really, really, really, really shitty music.

1.0 out of 10