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

It's time to realise...

I must spend far too long checking my gaydar messages; next week I shall post 2008's (dodgiest and brittle) highlights, Bananarama double-teaming anyone they can get their cougar claws on, and squeeze out the last batch of Vanilla recordings (frankly, at least going on my gaydar addiction, no fun can ever come out of vanilla sessions, but we shall see..)

A Message From Gala

Hi Handsome, let's organize a show ! why not ?
I don't know the place... But you seem an expert.
Yes for the interview any time for my real and attentive fans.

you are right about the electro sound, it will make it easy, and I like things the hard way though... I am getting remixes too. Anyone interested and really good you know, put them in contact.

I perform with a women band here in NY and in Punta del Este at the end of the month.

I hope the new album a collection of the best songs of my work in the past few years will be out in 2009, things are chnaging in the music world and I want to do the right thing, but I am a very independent mind and people ( straight men in particular at labels) don't know how to deal with it...:-)

Gala

Fresh!

Okay: next post simply has to have files attached - "on our way, on our way" indeed!

I am busy having a nervous breakdown over uni, but I shall get down with my blog after an essay has been suitable strangled. Before I write anthing about Deee-Lite, I once met the lady herself, who then poured me a vodka cranberry from her DJ booth when I told her I had work the next day! At the end of the night I was being chatted up and stalked home by a tranny (I forget what gender they were going for though).



Vocals like gristle in a missile!

Burning Cold

Xeonomania and Girls Aloud have made the album I wanted Cher to make with the same producers. Instead, Nadine Coyle sounds like the neice Tina Turner never had singing with 4 versions of the Norwegian whisper-siren Annie. The wisful Rolling Back The Rivers sees Nads deliver her finest tribute to the existence of syllables yet, singing every conceivable expression with even the shortest of words is her remarkable talent - Nadine is the vodka in the lemonade here (without her, there would be no spike, yet much of this album really is without her). However, Out of Control is really the closest the world has came to recieving a crimson warrior Nicola Roberts solo album: her grimmacing vocal on the taught Love Is Pain sets herself apart, as gale-force pathos is jotted into a falsely jaunty chorus; her intense macabre innocense and sympathetic honesty narrate much of the albums dark tales of severed endings and precautious beginnings. The track is so cold it's positively burning, whereas Turn To Stone is like a gritty slush-puppy, melting with resistance to an inevitable fate.

Sarah strives for the counterbalance of a suffering on the impaired heartache of The Loving Kind - singing "you might be disinclined" is her unnoficial follow-up to feeling "all funk-ay." The lush melacholia is nothing new for co-writers the Pet Shop Boys, but for the girls it's synth-pop heaven - quite simply the most sophisticated Sarah Harding will ever sound unless she ever accepts that invitation from the Queen to come round for some tea (and when I say the Queen, I of course mean Paul O'Grady). A car-wash of sadness and optimistic start-from-scratch survival instincts, singing of car-crash romances has taken it's toll on the girls and finally they are employing disarming new tactics along the way and it works wonders.

The album's serene highlight is without a doubt (about it) Untouchable - a song with softer tones than David Gray's Please Forgive Me. Distorted reality is dilluted into glistening eyes, and who better to convey unruffled dignity than the queen of utter-ness Nicola. With such static horror and ambivilance, her only way of sounding more calm would be to be dead - she sings softly, but speaks volumes. Reposed romance is gestured with stoic desperation shimmering in glittering guitar chords, and even the deadpan Cheryl makes herself useful for the first time since The Show singing a gorgeous "...everywhere I go-oh-oh" (trust me it works). The girls pass the baton with increasing succession, yet delicately lay things to rest with lyrics more sensitive than ever before. Nadine's fleeting pressense is once more a missed opportunity, but this is minor as the track is tragically epic. Presumably, there is so little of her simply because she had no strength left in those bread-stick legs to stand up long enough to record more than half a verse at a time.

An album mourning love's loss and yearning for it's ultimate return, there is never any huge climax on Out of Control (an album title which promised to reload the same gun that previous track Close To Love was fired so succesfully from), instead Little Bow Wow Wow jerks the more familiar fervor evident on 2005's Chemistry album, whilst the almost-ironicly tracklisted We Wanna Party is a 4 year old Lene (of Aqua fame) cover: Nadine is censored out when the song calls upon her to sneer the word "shit" - with that word in mind, hitting the fan is all but a distant memory here and the album is all about wiping the slate clean once again. Their old bitter-sweet charm has been tripple distilled and is more akin to finger-writing on condensation-frosted glass than Graffiti My Soul.

Kelly 'Kebab-Face' Llorenna

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Career Defining Lunacy

Good old barmy Gala finally squeezes out some fresh produce, from her much-anticipated sophomore album of course, via youtube: listen to the elated bristling euro-grunge plunge of Different Kind of Love, which is a shimmering strangle hold on Holly Vallance's seamless bunsen burner template gem Desire; the blissful coos that begin You & Me sound promising, with her typical flair for adamant lyrics; the No Doubt sounding No Man (is her new vocal style deliberately jarring, or just in free fall against inhibition?); salsa slam, sanity-sealing clarification I See Through Love breaks things down; the berserk hic-up Tough Love is the mooted first single (I hope not); the soggy tampon ballad Number 3 is like blowing your nose and proudly showing a stranger the contents; the yodelling Crying plods like an attempt to flush a blocked toilet and could certainly benefit from a "less is more" vocal approach; Faraway remains stealthy and silky smooth, her stoic ambition has stood the test of the time; and the impatient, fed up stump of Do It continues her tribal quest for immediate gratification of mind, body and solo career.



Most impressive of the new "new" tracks is the murky slurring persperation of She Really Wants It - Gala's sexual politics have always been more gripping than a corset, as are her grappling vocals that yelp defiantly. The renound sleek and sharp image, always defined by baffling and androgynous philosphies, an impassioned voice in pain over gender as a torturing and tedious expectation she refuses to shape herself to is now reinvented with colour and her advantage of warrior-like bone structure. The chaffing track oozes a tempting electro discharge that rivals the foaming filth of Dannii Minogue's best unreleased J.C.A penetrations (but with less asphixiation). The European-native has always been derranged and frankly bonkers; it took some time, as Siobhan Fahey once cackled, but here she is, back, back, back! Her shit is definately together..

There is no arguing that these songs stitch together some pretty disparate and barren moments of production. However, there is terrific excitement and a concious madness spearing through to make the decade-long wait worth every breakdown in between. The turgid stomping on, well, almost all of these clips, actually becomes her - the inital shock subsides and a storm of melody bursts and suddenly, with career defining luncacy, there is life in the old Gala yet.

Hight & Mighty

The most overwhelming pop song ever:



It has more surge than a Dannii Minogue facial expression.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexuals & Total weirdos 'R' Us

On a solo venture slowly shifting up to the LGBT stall at a crowded Freshers Fair 'clubs & societies' event, I approached cautiously with a kind of meekish trepidation suggesting I might have been just a little bit embarassed to do so. But why - was I experiencing my very own Gay Shame? Listen, "there is nothing wrong with being gay, you big gay" I calmly told myself, but there is a certain stomach-curdling dread at the realization that one might be deliberately choosing to alienate themself as part of a labelled group at the cost of so-called individuality. Surely the LGBT means being lumped together as a violently visible brigade of patent eye-sores: radioactive peroxide gelled spikes; studded Topman belts; beltching lesbians; and the odd rabbit-in-headlights tranny who looks like Liz McDonald's just had that one face-lift too many. Thank heavens that was only the bunch of freaks sitting behind the rugby table (which still does not explain why they were offering me lube, condoms and fisting gloves though). When I eventually turned up to the launch night of my first LGBT meeting, any perfectly rational discrimination was quickly dilluted into many lukewarm vodka diet colas and soon enough a weekly gathering, consisiting of judging others and deciding if people were goodlooking or not, became impossible to resist, like heroine or ITV's Loose Women. The LGBT certainly never affirmed my individual gayness to new levels of Kylie, but it did not do me or the people I no longer stay in touch with any harm either.

An Icon of Gay Betrayal

In 2004 an ex female work colleague once exclaimed to me "I'm all Gina G'd out!" - so just when did Ms. Gardiners' reign turn sour?




Gina G tried to bankcrupt her fans, that's why, blackmailing her loyal CD1-and-CD2-buying fans by relentlessly releasing no less than 1 million different singles from her one and only album Fresh! Her fearless knack for luring gay men into the false hope that acting like a tragic stereotype would make them feel empowered and frierce worked wonders in 1996 when the world was bombarded with her apalling homophobic gay-spoof Oooh Ahhh ... Is Someboy Fisting Me? Stopping short of giving free sachets of KY away with her album, Gina did settle with preying on fat people as accompanying chocolate bars were attached to limited copies upon its release. Her brand of demoralising campness reflected a remarkable phenomenon totally inaccessible to ardently indifferent heterosexuals, but the endless top ten hits tallied to the monumental momentum of 2 (although 2 more sank into the top 20 like a bullimic purging into a toilet bowl)

By 2005, passive gays complaining of "camp cramp" and no sense of identity thought they had seen the last of the crimson dance whore. They were wrong. Escaping from an American tourbus (thinking she was on a Brittish reality show, she was en route to serve life in an L.A prison for crimes against gay people), she gardinered her lady garden and gathered a garish army of tens of terrified teenage anorexic queens and called them "hairdressers", "make-up artists" and worst of all "gay best friend number 3" - attacking all British gay clubs not classy enough to afford Mary Kiani's megabus travel expenses, Tonight Is The Night may well have been her last public brawl to date, but will her "niche market" finally be safe? Not one to give up her scams, she continues to hang outside STD clinics flogging the same old act like it were 2002 again.

Coming soon: Gina G - an icon of gay betrayal and gasping glamour.

The More Tragic The Better

Throughout her "tumultuous" decade-long career of euphoric babbling, music has served as a hedge against Alanis being a willing fool (if anyone wants me to elaborate on my hedge theory - check out the video to Thank U for proof). She quite obviously writes to keep herself sane, to avoid any sense of being outwitted by an emotion she can't control or describe using the medium of song, and when a Hollywood shitcom actor takes time out from his busy sit-ups schedule to cheat on her, Alanis just knows this, okay? If you listen to her new album, the fact that she knows her fiance dumped her gradually begins to seep through, much the same way the unzipping bassline of Straight Jacket kills off any white picket fence dreams with the defensive growl "I don't know who you're talking to with such fucking disrespect" before relishing the twisted behaviour with "this shit's making me crazy". However, she may only be ordering a Pizza - 3 tracks in and we just don't know what is up with her yet this time.

Like her mile-long hair, Flavours requires some initial untangling before it flows, and opener Citizen of The Planet is more knotted than Joan 'Gollum' Collins combing out a wig husband Percy put in the washing machine by mistake. The dense recipe recital is a misplaced murky turkey, merely serving to highlight a return to the familiar decorative sound of 1998's Junkie album. What else is on the menu?

More inviting is the graceful yet anthemic first single Underneathe, which is in awe and astonished with still moist tear-stained recovery, whilst the baton-change of producer duties is already apparant as Guy Sigsworth provides her most hypnotic setting since the tinkling-focus plunge of Thank U. The jangly ballad is tender and cautious and she bows to a bigger explanation, revisiting the theme of soaring bender Joining You.

Soggy tampon Not As We is a heartbreaking piano ballad test-driving a new found restraint to her vocal range. The odd sensation continues on In Praise of The Vulnerable Man, a sunkissed relation to the Sugababes' New Year. Each verse begins with her singing "you" as if struggling to breathe or not shout, like an accusation suddenly escaped as she contines "... are the greatest man I've ever given head to in a theatre" or something. There is also a dissarming echo of Deetah's 1998 pop-rap gem Relax.

On track Moratorium, Alanis really should remember to close her fridge door - chills creep into every corner, with an emotionally-broken narrative similar to The Couch. The atmospheric arrangements could almost be lifted from the film The Day After Tomorrow - I do hope Jake Gyllenhaal never dumped her too, which he probably has no idea about anyway. The chorus tinkers like a disco in the morgue causing danceloor cramp - the body count is presumably her ex-boyfriends whereby she "declares a war on failed relationships". Close that fridge, Alanis!

A bleeding sky hovers over the singer on the foreboding Versions of Violence, a gravity-defying hot air floats with cathedral chanting before something scratches and the searing chorus is worthy of her best torrid screachers from her first two albums. The marathon chorus of Torch puts more strain on an already well-weathered emotional landscape, and is the perfect counterpart for the gushing sadness of her crestfallen verses. It's clear there is no sprint to the finish here.

Conversely, Alanis finds pace as a burning sunset treacles through on Giggling Again For No Reason, an atypical divine rush of sighing adrenaline. The shimmering flutter activates an ascent to the albums highest peak of melody, a horizontal speed into blinding white light.

Incomplete has a deliberately unconcinving chirpiness to it that suggests Alanis doesn't really believe that she'll be one of those "30th anniversary" ladies and would rather enjoy her own personal pursuits of discovery. The chorus relinquishes the appeal of Stepford-esque bliss and is much more satisfying as a consequence.

Overall, the pureness to her vocal is a relevation to behold - by holding back she has much more impact and resonance like never before. A sincere clarity unravels throughout tracks 2-11 into a beguiling abandon that is all her own collision, coralling rage and an elegance of temperament into the proper setting.

Giggling Again For No Reason

In Praise of The Vulnerable Man

Too Gone, Too Long

I haven't reaally been posting on this for quite some time; a shame as it can be absorbing distraction and fun to lay down my pseudo-bizarre and contrived affectionate thoughts on some of pop worlds most imperial, trashy and melodramatic divas on offer. I used to truly love posting on certain message boards, but it's extremely hard to swim in a tide of text speak and reactionary swirlings of venom - is that non-specific enough?

I'm listening to a clutch of very accomplished albums, which include Ladytron, Alanis, Cyndi and the usual sustained-awe for Dana, Dannii and the Sioux. To the left, to the left (Edit: it's actually to the right), is a small gesture designed to meet the demmands of whoever might stumble upon my humble blogging district, and the result of this poll shall determine the spotlight focus of my next posting. Hopefully, I shall regain a bit of messaging momentum as I am the first to admit I have had some recent uphevals, despite my usual online loiterings, but with the aforementioned albums I am still very much adoring music as a kind of controllable autism.

Disco Dracula's Botox Masacre

The unique otherness of Dannii's disorganised, daft disco delirium reinvents the genre of what people who speak English call "dance". Her one woman show... an amusing disorder, dispatching like a mysterious religion, consistently outperforms Kylie on mythical merits alone. Her strict diet of laziness hovers over the whole project, with a nimble appetite for original material making sure there is no way in hell she'd ever lower herself by having a hit album or, hold the stomach tight, a number 1 single anywhere but in Japan or made-up club charts that don't even exist. Dannii will not be broken, ever - and that's just her forehead.

However, she will allow herself to be tampered with, as on her feel-good opening opus 'Touche Eclat' Me Like That, which marks her territory distinctly with a vivid pounding from Jason Nevins. An excited Dannii only then wasted all her energy by ripping the staples out of Joan Collins' scalp in order to steal the former Dynasty stars favourite wig, and subsequently had no enery left to move in the video; instead the mega buzz generated from auditioning gay-for-pay dyke dancers stunned her into full collapse when a squeeling D finally couldn't take anymore pain of standing up and breathing at the same time. (8.5/10)

She regains her conciousness with the sinewy aspartame injection Feel Like I Do, which glints with unassuming menace and quite possibly is overrated, but I love the chaffing bassline rubbing Dannii's thighs red raw - it has a razorblade sharpness to it more lethal than any shaken-Pepsi-can explosion of Perfection or YWFAM's sedated sunkissed seduction (is Sunny D sing it whilst snorkling in the shallow end, of her bath?). It glows with a radioactive irritability to stay still and erodes all the fake-tan sheen of her AATW associations. Dance is clearly Dan's secret outlet for her same-sex cravings, "it's my only way to lesbo" seeps a torturing agony to relieve herself on a sticky dancefloor. (10/10, 7.5/10, 8/10)

Equally messy, Perfection is more spreadable than Dannii in a dyke bar enquiring about a sling, and is as much a guilty pleasure as pulling back for the full facial - if Dannii runs out of SPF for her baps and forehead she knows what to do. The trashtastic grimness of being a Dannii fan took a new dive into swirling currents of glazed abandon. (7.5/10)

Meanwhile, when grief and lust collide and curdle, the tight and disciplined So Under Pressure spurts sisterly sympathy as Dannii hisses and groans in order to show a bloated and bald Kylie how much she wants a hit single. Taking her older-and-plump siblings bullimia into consideration (D just doesn't have the stomach for it), she can't resist taking a non-botox jab: "I'm sorry you couldn't keep lunch down ... You know I can't be there whenever you want me to" and refuses to clean up the mess, literally, leaving Special K with a toilet bowl crusted with dry vomit. She then pays the price when Kylie gaffatapes her in the boot of her 4X4 - "mmm, ooh, mmm, mmm" breathes Danoushka through her flared nostrils as I'm Sorry coos with the elegance of a cow being slaughtered. (8/10, 10/10)

Still high on the idea of risk, Love Fight is the clubcentric flare-up I've been waiting for, etc, wherein she gives her wimpering frayed clit a rest and wants a black eye instead. The gas-bubble intro teeters like blowing into a glass of milk using a straw, and an inexplicable standstill, better saved for a video edit, both disqualify her affirmingly life-threatning quest for sexual climax via a clenched fist. When Dannii roars "on the floor!" a lesbian stampede marches all over the poor bint. (8/10)

After her near-death experience, I Will Come To You is the sound of Ms. D waking up in a strange hotel while ants devour her love cake. The global sunbathing epidemic of Danniigoose let's loose on the ubiquitous plight of global warming and her own concious negation of family life and career on 'Round The Pool. Both are tangible strands of where she could have travelled to musically with a bona fide studio album. Club Disco is the spit trying to compensate for lube, the split ends to her usual and expected full gloss sheen, but has enough momentum to excell allow entry when it matters. (7.5/10, 7.5/10)

Redeeming her "free access" excesses, the oozing tranquility of Do You Believe Me Now has the tenderness of excess botox trickling down Dannii's football tight forehead after a painful session from her "doctor" (goes by the name of Nathan apparantly). Her endurance obviously reminds her what is important in life and sings obediently to suggest she must really love this lesbian kiss-n-tell stripper she's leaving a voicemail to. (9/10)

Perhaps the only dance song about having a colonic, the disco coma Gone unravels inertly, coasting on a faux-Moroder bassline and only tightens up for a focused acceleration on the brief middle-8. Her shrill testimony retreats into herself, but she does claim she's very hands on supposedly anyway. (6/10)

The best parts of Club Disco reinvent her ravaged genre, and forcefully introduce some of the old zest back into her bloodstream, with her fundemental principle of "vagina and a disco beat" completing a compendium of her elevatary dance achievements. Her chaotic and unruly attitude towards her career coherently consists of unconnected raw elements - a decorative chain of tacky mash-ups, puppy-fat dance boppers, scalpel carved electro eroders, all hang between 6 month release gaps and fan-droid anguish for more. It's just good to have her functioning!

Album highlight: "On the floor!" as Dannii sentences herself to death via a lesbian stampede.

(10/10, "I know it's all my fault" - Dannii Minogue)