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

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.