Basically tell us all about what you think about Kylies 2003 "Body Language" album

Though it has its moments I find Body Language dissapointing. I think after the success in the states of "Fever" she basically made a follow up album that would appeal to americans. But, like I said it does have its moments. It's got a funky prince style recording session vibe to it. Tracks like "Slow" are so kylie yet so different at the same time that it works. But then tracks like "Red Blooded Woman" seem like they were written for someone else. lyrics like "let me keep freakin around, I wanna get down" are the worst things I have ever heard Kylie say. Album highlights are Slow, Secret and surpsingly Choclate. I like how the album has a different pace to her others. Its slower, funkier a bit more grown up - but not what Kylie's good at. Its an okay effort, but nothing special. I like the theme for the album and her Body Language look. Its a crime it sold more than Dannii's "Neon Nights" which is a much superior album.

Edited August 29, 200618 yr by Ozx

BBC

 

 

It must have seemed a shrewd move for Kylie to dive unto a big pool of electro beats and dance sounds drawn from eighties pop. These styles have worked well for the Sugababes and Liberty X. Body Language is full of robotic techno sounds, hard syndrums and squelchy synthesizers. The single "Slow" is typical: keyboards blip, Kylie polishes up her best American R n B vocal style and coos right in your ear.

 

This revival of cheesy eighties pop and dance styles has worked because it's been revisited with a level of raw sex that wasn't spelt out twenty years ago. But you can't imagine Kylie singing "Freak Like Me" to Gary Numan samples, or dueting with sleazy electroclash porno queen Peaches. The princess of pop has always been sexy, but never, ever crude. Body Language is professional but a bit polite.

 

She vamps it up, as on the Ms Dynamite penned "Secret", with its vocodered vocals and sinister bass squirts, and even tries a distorted rap, but remains coquettish rather than bitchy. This contrasts with the sweet pop, with added disco whistles, of "Promises", as squeaky clean as anything shes done. "Promises" is produced by dance legend Curtis Mantronix whose "Got To Have Your Love" was successfully revived by Liberty X. But despite Curtis' credentials it actually sounds like something Stock, Aitken and Waterman could have knocked up. He does better on the slick R n B pop of "Obsession".

 

Upcoming Icelandic artist Emiliana Torrini co-writes "Red Blooded Woman", a bid to inject some windswept European drama with swirling strings. "Chocolate" is a great title for a Kylie song, but jogs along in a wash of breathy vocals without making much impression. "I Feel For You" has some Chic style rhythm guitar, bubbling bass and a startling sample, but unfortunately no chorus.

 

What Body Language really lacks is a killer hit single, a "Spinning Around" or "Can't Get You Out Of My Head". It's pleasant, but too much of the material seems routine: candyfloss rather than dark, tangy chocolate.

 

 

Uncut

 

She was always going to struggle to follow "Can't Get You Out Of My Head", that ziggurat of cyber-pop which Paul Morley wrote a 180,000-word book about and described as the missing link between Shostakovich and Steps. Body Language tries too hard, period. It comprises a dozen attempts to prove that La Minogue is, as one title here risibly puts it, a "Red Blooded Woman", superfluous perhaps when one considers she has been parading her pudenda before us for a decade. Self-consciously libidinous first single "Slow" is just Madonna circa Erotica doing Grace Jones circa Nightclubbing. It took nine—NINE!—writers to come up with the girl-group hackwork of "Secret". Curtis Mantronik's "Someday" and "Promises" sound like offcuts from the sessions that produced "Got To Have Your Love". "Chocolate" is trip hop for tweenies. And there's a duet with Green Gartside that for people of a certain age and aesthetic inclination should be godlike but is entertaining mostly because, after all the tweaking and smurfing of her voice, Kylie still doesn't sound as p****-girly as Mr Politti. And there's only one Cathy Dennis song, and it's awful.

 

Pop Matters

 

In late 2002, Kylie Minogue and Fischerspooner's Casey Spooner caused a bit of a stir with their racy performance of Fischerspooner's remix of "Come Into My World" on the BBC's Top of the Pops program. Viewers might have been instantly drawn to Ms. Minogue's slinky undergarments (revealed to all when Spooner ripped her dress off with a flourish), but even more curious was the music itself. Here was a song from an album that exuded a definite, '70s disco vibe, but placed in the hands of the American electro duo, it was transformed into a writhing, sexy blast of '80s synth pop; it was as if Kylie's wayback machine was reset for 1982 instead of 1977, and what a perfect fit it was, a fitting follow-up remix to the ingenious Kylie/New Order mash-up, "Can't Get Blue Monday Out of My Head". Kylie must have thought the same thing, as well.

 

Minogue's 2001 album Fever was a long-overdue breakthrough in North America; for a decade, she had reigned as one of the top pop acts in the world, but had been unable to follow up her early Stateside success as a Stock, Aitken, and Waterman product back in 1988. Teaming up with dance pop star-turned producer Cathy Dennis on several standout tracks, the disco-fused Fever was a monstrous success, thanks largely to a bevy of terrific singles, led by the worldwide smash "Can't Get You Out of My Head". Here was a pop album that reveled in ultra-contagious melodies and irresistible dance beats, keeping things simple. The result was a classy piece of work which peaked in America at Number Three on the album chart, the thirtysomething Minogue upstaging soulless, brainless music by younger American pop tarts like Britney and Christina.

 

On Kylie's new album Body Language, she makes the move from disco to the more synthetic strains of synth pop, obviously inspired by the likes of Gary Numan and Giogio Moroder, not to mention the aforementioned 2002 remix. In contrast to the pulsating, hi-hat driven dance beat of Fever's "More More More", Body Language gets off to a more understated start. "Slow", the first single, and focal point of the entire album, kicks off with a minimal synth intro that sounds like it came straight from an Atari 2600 console, as clicking beats stutter along. Minogue is at her most sultry and seductive, as she croons, "Knew you'd be here tonight/ So I put my best dress on/ Boy I was so right," as the synths build up subtly, only to come to an immediate halt on the hypnotic chorus. As on Fever, Minogue knows that less is more, her lack of vocal range veiled by the simple arrangement. Co-written by Icelandic-Italian chanteuse Emiliana Torrini, it's one of the strongest singles of Minogue's career.

 

That '80s electro feel continues on the album's first half, as "Still Standing" and "Promises" rely on buzzing, low synth lines driving the beats, and chord flourishes that sound straight out of 1984. The light, breezy funk of "Sweet Music" boasts a great hook that seems to evoke both early Prince and INXS, as Minogue sings, "And we can get/ Crazy like that/ Feel it like that/ Move it like that/ Drop it like that/ Rocking the track/ I'm looking for that new sen-sa-tion," while "Red Blooded Woman" blends the 80s sound with an almost garage-like beat, the lyrics containing yet another '80s reference (Dead or Alive this time), not to mention a great line in, "You'll never get to Heaven if you're scared of getting high." The aggressive "Secret (Take You Home)" makes up for its hackneyed lyrics ("Here's my secret/ I'm a girl who likes her fun") with a snappy little whistle-like melody, as well as a coquettish rap by Minogue.

 

The rest of Body Language quickly loses steam, however. "Obsession", "I Feel For You", and "Someday" are all more influenced by R&B, and admirably crank up the funk, but the melodies are forgettable, and amount to little more than mere filler. Meanwhile, the turgid, boring "Loving Days" sounds like any other empty-headed Pop Idol ballad. Only the slinky closing track "After Dark" and the steamy "Chocolate ("Hold me and control me and then/ Melt me slowly down") keep the last half of the album from being a complete waste of time.

 

Listening to the more laid-back Body Language, you can't help but think of how buoyant, warm, and upbeat Fever is, and wishing the new album would have something as undeniably catchy as "Can't Get You Out of My Head", as euphoric as "Love at First Sight", as welcoming as "Come Into My World". Minogue's foray into early '80s electro works well at times, but compared to the perfection of her previous album, it's ultimately a mild disappointment, leaving you cold; besides, Goldfrapp's superb album Black Cherry weaves synth pop with modern dance beats much more expertly, and the songs are much catchier than most of the ones on this disc. Still, even though Body Language is a bit of a misstep for Minogue, there's a sense of class to it. Kylie and her producers never overdo things, always taking the high road, aware of her limitations as a singer. Her style might seem too safe for some listeners, but for her, it's a perfect fit. Britney could learn a thing or two.

 

 

Stylus

 

 

Pop stars. Attention whores. Idealistically bankrupt sex-babies with glossy mouths and fear in their eyes. Before a populist mutiny retched its own terrible creation from its throat like a piece of virally infected beef, these artistic deviants roamed in a realm parallel to the sweaty reality of those who idolized them. What was their aim? Ostensibly, it was to divert: whether they were pandering to the camera’s unblinking eye with dead smiles in entertainment magazines, having their sordid tales spread out across tabloid newspapers ("Britney snorts two-foot coke mountain in Miami nightclub!" "Christina’s slips into rigor mortis after ‘lip’ incident!"), or seen jerked around in the studio, having their tiny voices digitized into something awful and inhuman, these naVve child-people unselfishly emblazoned their lives into a silicon and plastic shell, offering bagfuls of grist for our conversational mills.

 

Then the whole thing went to hell because everyone decided that this somehow wasn’t enough; that despite Britney attempting to expand her boundaries by recording with, say, a small battalion of Taiwanese string players, she was the one grifting us all. People! Did you not hear her paean to loneliness and woe, "Lucky"? "If there’s nothing missing in my life/Then why do the tears come at night?" Indeed, the recent Pop Holocaust signaled the captivating free-fall of a slew of tormented ingénues: Hanson’s cherubic tweens are now fully grown, and suffering the stigmatizing after-effects of their androgyny; Christina Aguilera is hanging desperately onto her popularity by conducting a surgical re-imagination of herself as collision between Ayn Rand, Betty Page, and an iguana; the Backstreet Boys I think are all dead.

 

But there is one woman who miraculously—impossibly--survived the tongue-lashings, the pitiable accusations slathered across the television set. I attribute Kylie Minogue’s survvival to the same sort of visual mechanism that zebras use to escape their predators; her "stripes," a genial sexiness that has enabled her to continue her musical endeavors for nearly two decades, have always been alluring and winsome. Something about the looseness with which she delivers her songs, the ease with which she has slipped from frizzy-haired and toothy, and urging Americans to engage in the foreign "Locomotive" dance, to Nick Cave’s gothic duet partner on Murder Ballads, has proved extremely enduring. By merit of her willingness to take chances and "lay it all out on the table," Kylie doesn’t constantly need to pander for our approval, or commit actions of unsound mind and questionable lawfulness, for our attention. She knows she has it.

 

After Kylie dazzled us with the electro-waifery of 2001’s Fever, she seemed to have finally found her niche: Matron of sex-bomb pop thrills. Thus it’s no surprise that her new Body Language isn’t so much a massive artistic leap as it is a total distillation of her sound and style. As the title infers, the album’s emphasis on pure dance music (And less on lyrical content, which is, let’s face it, nothing more than a syllabic device to fill out the blips and bleeps), approaches a sort of kinetic, orgiastic transcendence—music that communicates not through sound, but through the movement it inspires. Body Language isn’t a surprising record, but that’s the whole point; as in Fever Kylie has again superceded her American counterparts with an album of fashionable thrills, dance-pop artisanship, and total, utter hotness.

 

Though there’s no set theme (and I certainly doubt Kylie or her producers intended there to be), Body Language could be read as a bildungsroman of the listener’s gradual coming to grips with their love of dance music–of how Kylie first taunts the listener with her irrepressably "party-up" nature, insidiously coaxes them into joining the dance floor with her, and teaches them the rules and logistics of dance-floor etiquette: how one should "grind," how one should seduce, and most importantly, how one should have a good time. "Slow" is a tentative start of disjointed Prince-isms. As the music coils around Kylie’s writhing body like a snake, Kylie lures the listener away from their dimly-lit corner table with the sultry demand, "Come on dance with me...slow." How could one not oblige? At this point, the listener is open to Kylie’s demands, and willing to resort to any means necessary to impress her. "Still Standing" wields its gurgling keyboard hook like a leather whip, keeping the listener’s less pure intentions at bay. The songs celebratory vocals–"I’m still standing, still dancing, yeah! You know you want it!"–is at once an indictment of the critics who thought Kylie would have long since faded into pop obscurity, and a celebration of her irrepressible nature.

 

After that, there’s no turning back. Kylie proves herself to be a consummate entertainer, breezing through the chill muzak of "Promises" and "Chocolate"’s wild disco jam with equal ease. But probably the penultimate moment of the album comes during the irresistible psuedo-funk of "Sweet Music." Propelled by a sticky bass groove and a halo of whirring synths, Kylie purrs "And we can go crazy like that, feel it like that, move it like that, drop it like that...I’m looking for that new sensation!" as the music increases in fervor, eventually reaching the heights of a full-fledged rave-up. Out of the most basic elements of disco music–the brisk clap of a hi-hat, astral keyboard effects–Kylie asserts herself as the pocket-sized Disco diva she truly is. In fact, the album only falters when it attempts to process Kylie through the Pop-Star Machine, artlessly tacking on unnecessary vocal echoes and an overabundance of sultriness that undercuts the purity of the entertainment on display. But those are anamolies; as the album progresses, it becomes sparser, funkier, and sexier. Unlike other pop starlets who might see it fit to back-load their albums with their most gaudy and bombastic numbers, Kylie settles into an athletic, whip-smart groove midway through the album, and doesn’t let up until the end.

 

"But it’s just pop music!" I know you’re thinking this (And even if you’re not, I am). In response to this remark, I’ll point out that pop music constitutes most of what the average American hears for most of his or her life. Why shouldn’t the best of it be reclaimed as something more than window-dressing? Much as one wouldn’t consciously choose to live on the perimeter of a sewage plant, or ingest massive amounts of glue for supper, we should make efforts to avoid the soul-deadening artificiality of song-whores like the Matrix* and all those Swedish guys that write Britney’s music, and instead flock to the warmth of what is carefully made and true. With Body Language, Kylie makes like an antibiotic and invades the Mainstream—curing the myriad pop maladies we suffer aurally every day, and leaving a trail of dead in her wake.

 

 

Yahoo

 

 

She's not so much an artist now as a corporate entity. Kylie is as recognisable and ubiquitous as Starbucks, so familiar a presence that her surname became redundant years ago. Even Britney - who, in a spooky marketing 'coincidence', releases her fourth LP this very same week - hasn't yet had the courage to drop her Spears. (Just how many other Britneys could she possibly be confused with?)

 

The key to Kylie's success, of course, is constant reinvention. One of the commandments of pop would seem to be 'do unto yourself as Madonna would have done to her' and although she isn't quite in Madge's league of endless, mimetic makeovers, Kylie's keenly aware that time is more than capable of kicking her pert ass and that she must therefore keep moving.

 

Cue the Princess of Pop's ninth studio album. Cast now as Brigitte Bardot, Kylie coos, whispers and kittenishly aspirates her way through 'Body Language' in a manner that makes Jane Birkin sound like Andrew WK. She's never been a belter, of course, but the sexually suggestive, self-conscious breathiness quickly palls, while the question as to why a 30-something woman might agree to be made to sound like a ten year-old girl is perhaps one best not asked.

 

Having hired a team of disparate writers and producers - Emiliana Torrini, Cathy Dennis and Kurtis Mantronik included - Kylie's gone electro. An ill-judged move, maybe, considering that this particular bandwagon is already rolling out of sight, but she's kept in pop character and, after discovering the gold-dusted gloriousness of 80s disco, has given it a cheese topping of Duran Duran, one-hit wonders Nu Shooz and - even less glamorously - Dead Or Alive.

 

A copy of Madonna's 'Erotica' was also clearly kept close by ('Loving Days' could be an outtake), alongside Michael Jackson's 'Off The Wall' (check out 'Sweet Music', where Kylie attempts a Justin T and the execrable, Dennis-penned pastiche, 'After Dark'). Heaven knows what the godlike Green Gartside (of Scritti Politti) was thinking when he agreed to guest on the insipid 'Someday'.

 

It's not all bad news - 'Slow' is a sexy but splendidly subtle first single and 'Chocolate' so lush and ludicrously layered a confection that it's actually a real treat. There is, however, nothing that remotely touches the pop genius of 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' and, by the halfway mark, the album's sagging badly. 'Body Language' confirms what we already knew: Kylie is a singles sprinter, not a marathon talent.

 

 

5/10

Allmusic

 

If Light Years was the comeback, and Fever the confirmation, then Body Language can best be described as Kylie's "big step forward." Sure it's still simple dance-pop, but this time she (and a team of producers and writers — including Kurtis Mantronik — it must be said) has put together an album that works as a piece. It's stylish without being smarmy, retro without being ironic, and its energy never gets annoying. In other words: a near perfect pop record. Instead of opting for more of the light dance- and disco-pop of the last two releases, Kylie has sought to expand her horizons. Adding elements of electroclash, '80s synth pop, bouncy club beats — even a dash of Eminem-style raps! — she's found the formula that not only makes her vocal shortcomings irrelevant but gives her the edge on the rest of the divas on their newfound quest: maturity. While Madonna, Xtina, and Britney have attempted to achieve maturity through trashiness and not really all that shocking behavior (i.e., that MTV Awards kiss), Kylie maintained a low profile, retained a sense of class, and put together what may well be the best album of her career. Simply, Body Language is what happens when a dance-pop diva takes the high road and focuses on what's important instead of trying to shock herself into continued relevance.

 

4.5/5

I must admit im not a huge fan of this album but to me i put it in the same league as Impossible Princess in the fact its an album that at first I didnt like but over time have appreciated it more.

im not a hufe fan of the album at all,it was a big disapointment in every term really,i understand kylie wanted to do something different which is fine and again it is something that will probably stand to her in years to come,i love slow and chocolate they are brilliant but the overall package disappointed me,again its not an album i listen to alot but following up light years and fever was a very hard task to do to start with

Yeah it was def hard to follow those. I suppose she wanted to try something different but I persoanlly dont think it worked but she did look amazing in some of the pictures of that era

ya some of the pics she looked well hot that for sure

I must admit im not a huge fan of this album but to me i put it in the same league as Impossible Princess in the fact its an album that at first I didnt like but over time have appreciated it more.

 

This basically meens you forced yourself to like it? lol

 

Lol not really. I just had to give it more of a chance and open my mind a bit more to how different it was to previous albums. Dont get me wrong i still think it in te bottom 2 of her worst albums but its not as bad as i once thought.

I see what you meen. I like it but I often brush it off because its not what Kylie is good at. This sound did not suite her. "Red Blooded Woman" would have been a better song if some american pop tart sang it. Not Kylie. The whole album seems mismatched. Forced

Again i agree. Ive never been a big fan of "red blooded woman" but I do love "slow". But even still this album just is not her and just didnt work but again its nice to see her at leat try something

I agree in a sense that it was a refreshing change. And I am glad she changes from time to time. But it was very risque changing at this point. Considering it was her follow up to Fever

Yeah i think she could ave picked a different time to try somthing different becuase I would ave loved another album like fever and light years. But hey its Kylie. She doesnt also do what you expect, but thats a quality i like.

I do like it but its not my fave. I agree that it misses some big hit singles.

It was different for Kylie. I mean not many people could think she would follow up Fever really, and she didn't do too bad, at least it gave her a #1. The sad thing is it's clearly the fans that bought the album and not very many other people. The album was practically all filler.

Standouts:

Slow

Red Blooded Woman

Chocalate

Secret (Take You Home)

Loving Days