Way Beyond The Pale

In a bizarre twist of fate, Kelly Llorenna releases a thumping trance cover of an 80s hit called Dress You Up originally sung by Madonna. Kelly is both MAD for it and MAD for DONNA-kebabs so it's a dream come true for the orange Nazi to get her cake and eat it and throw it back up and eat it once again. Like dairy, Llorenna just repeats and repeats until any record label that signs her goes bust. Already her former N-Trance producer Keven O'Toole is logging onto youtube pretending to be "a friend of Kevin" in order to diss the girl he clearly has a morbid obsession for (he's practically a gay fan!).

What, more?

Sarah Whatmore gives her lover the what-for on her legendary J-Lo rip-off Autdomatic and writhed on a beach on the radio-lingering hit When I Lost You, but what happened to the parent album Living Proof?

Are You Ready For Love is sung as if the 'act' is already under way (with or without her would be my guess). Whatmore sounds like a more impassioned Gina G - the similarity is warmly reassuring as Sarah clearly was onto something not bad here.

Synths drool down the chin on Don't Let Me Go. Sticky vocoder verses and cushioning ooh's pass the time until the equally glib chorus has a goegeous sunset in mind - it's about as sexy as passing wind but this is pleasing half-baked dancefloor fodder at its best. Further Gina G-isms are evident from the flamenco flutter of Close To Me, which definately burns from the same candle as the album version of Everytime I Fall if you're after specific comparisons, but can't hit the same 'G'-spot, per say, as that song's eventual Todd Terry radio edit or Metro dance remix.

She shares a secret on the clumsily titled No One Knows, a miss-fire acoustic number I think really gives such hindsight listening to these tracks a conclusion that she wasn't a particularly extraordinary dance fiva after all. A tragic glimpse to the Delta Goodrimmer aspirations she is flirting with in 2009.

While the convincing revenge-plotting of Automatic is fully qualified ("you tried to video tape me, then you tried to rent me out" is hilarious), Are You Ready For Love and Don't Let Me Go are promising indicators that she was a mere 2 great songs away from having what will always pass for an outstanding dance album.

Whatmore is like an impaired dance-pop singer - she can't survive without The Remix (her recent 2 singles are very much evidence of this). It seems now she has chosen to abruptly abandon a style that fitted her like Sharon Osbourne's gastric band; it snapped and now it's gone all a bit shit.

Are You Ready For Love
Don't Let Me Go
Close To Me

Finger On The Pulse

Why no play while you read?



When I started my blog a few years ago (it might also feel that I post as often as every few years), a favourite of mine was one of ageing diva Tina Cousins. Her dancefloor decay is evident on a face that looks trampled on by hords of happy club-goers. I am afraid that performing in too many chav clubs trying to sustain her taste for the high life has had its consequences: these places, as Dannii who avoids them knows (if one remembers my 'Dannii Roadkill' report), are dangerous - the moment a Cascada or Kelly Llorenna track starts, stampedes ensue and casualties are par for the course. Of course, punters run to the dancefloor when Cascada start pounding, whereas punters run away from the dancefloor when fake tan starts flooding the cloob as Kelly Llorenna whispers the name of her song ("is this really love or just a game?" was also her catchphrase as a hooker back in the day before making it big).




Cousins' remarkable survival has given her a revived sense of creativity on her new 90s trance anthem Can't Hold Back (The Years). "I finger you when I'm alone, it's what you do that turns me on" is unusually frank, but after her near-death experiences, Tina proudly giggles she's got nothing to lose these days. Please buy Tina's new song that isn't out yet - it's so good that she's been boasting about it since almost before I started writing this blog and I dread to think what her face will look like if you don't.

That was 2008 then...

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Crystal Meth & Special K

The crystal-meth cool from the lazy, drooling vocals from dance-dalek Krystal K juxtoposes breezey ("progressive") house courtesy of famed-lesbo Dannii disciple Jean Claude Ades and an oozing undertone of insoucience. J.C.A certainly likes his divas relaxed: Dannii obviously turned this one down, presumably supergluing herself to a sunlounger to get out of it, then just sniffing the stuff. The vocalist, under what guise is anyone's guess, had previously supported pork-scratching Robbie Williams, torso-owner Usher and pre-rehab Backstreet Boys, and by the time Let's Get It Right was released back in 2002, the song may as well have been snorted up a triangular Minogue nostril for all the impact it had (denting the allusive top 40 American Billboard dance charts). Nevertheless, her icy and aloof glamour purs a memorably monotone drole that melts into the serene grooves, which are far lighter than the tightly executed Dannii Monogue seapages that would hiss out of speakers in only a matter of months time. The Altitude remix illuminates an arctic sky into a heated trance, yet the husky vocals are an added thrill that even Dannii would have a hard time out-smutting. Buy the single wherever you can find it: you'll get to hear the Vox remix, which trust me is nearly 8 minutes.

Let's Get It Right - Radio Edit
Let's Get It Right - Altitude Remix