Full-Speed Euro-Dance

Since crimson antipodean dance warrior Gina G decided that growing a human being in her baggy womb was far more important than giving gays a reason to live, her 1 album legacy of 'love goddess' Hi-NRG perfection has finally found a pretender to her thrown. She comes in the form of 'Swedish Idol' winner Agnes Carlsson - with a name that just screams to be lit up in neon lights above dingey gay bars across the world, not only does she have the looks many transsexuals would kill for, her luggage of national popularity and an even bigger forehead set expectations high indeed. Her 3rd album Dance Love Pop has qualified her to 3 native top ten hits and currently sees her releasing Release Me as her missile into the UK and other European markets.

The album's first domestic single was the technoid On & On, a full-speed collision between early 90s Euro-dance duo Culture Beat and Tina Cousins. Impact is instant, and Carlsson is unflinching whilst a rave-up flares not a million miles away from the racaus carnage of Dead Or Alive's Nukleopatra.

The haunting Love Me Senseless is a cross between Laurent Wolf's No Stress and Love Inc's Broken Bones. A great pun wasted nevertheless, the track is melancholy with all the anguish of having trapped wind that won't shift in time for an internet meet. Agnes takes drastic action, and the track is as compelling as sex life strife in popworld gets.

The radio-ready current single Release Me is tamer yet her emphatic dedication remains equally evident, revving up comparisons to Lara Fabien and various Hex Hector remixes. The video bears a most unflattering resemblence to Madonna's Hung Up promo where an ensemble of stage school embiciles pretend that hip hop is their way of life whilst dancing to a disco track. Making up for the misguided choreography is Angnes' own drag queen worthy strutting as she minces to her nearest gay bar. Inside, some of the videos best shots are shown as the track's instrumental spins in drunken bliss - if that girl does not leave the gay bar for a mmf sleepover now then she will probably never leave the guy she is whingeing about.

How Do You Know? is not only my standard responce to overweight female customers who limp their wrists at me as I sell my soul in order to sell face and body products to them ('take this into the shower you'll be making noises your husband hasn't heard since you first got married'), but this is also about Agnes defending her decision to become a woman; the young Andreas would be proud as he becomes the pop diva he always creamed of whilst stealing his sisters Just 17 magazines to sneak peaks at AJ from the Backstreet Boys amongst others.

Elsewhere, saggy Aggie returns to her full-throttle capabilities on the stodgy stomper Open Up Your Eyes where her theatrical wail never sounded better. If only Mariah would record a song so frivolously sleazy. Carlsson's impatience snaps into anthemic proportions after her un-named sex partners can't bear to look at her anymore. Undaunted, Agnes is at the top of her game and warns Don't Pull Your Love Out.

Look At Me stimulates similar emotions to Whitney's jittery So Eotional, but achieves the same effect by sticking two fingers up (although 'look at the way I spread my legs' goes a bit too far). Her slick campaign of unabashedly uptempo numbers is a high-impact assault that will take place in the hearts of dance-pop lovers all over the world and will probably leave Lisa Scott-Lee crying into her empty packets of cream crackers. Gina G will most likely be too knee-high in baby dirt to notice, but a new pop pricess has arrived.

Delight In Dysfunction

Billie Ray Martin's largely undiscovered 1994 collaboration with the Grid, an E.P titled 4 Ambient Tales, remains her most romantic and impressionistic to date. Unfairly, Martin is largely remembered as the singer of the circumstantially faceless trance love song Your Loving Arms (a genuine international hit single), or from Electribe 101 who had even less success yet left a critical legacy not to be overlooked. The fact that her back catalogue is a curious condition of scattered collaborations (often unreleased) and a mere 2 albums, is a major betrayal of a singer her fans consider to be the most expressive soul singer since Dusty Springfield ('the Dietrich of techno' is another odd yet apt description).

Often overspilling in a knowingly perverse thrill over the melodrama she sings of (hear her scream 'there is a body on the floor that looks like me' on the ballad Deadline For My Memories and you will worry that she would have needed a strait-jacket afterwards), Billie sings truthfully nevertheless and always avoids the cliches of her genre. Here, this is the sound of someone closing their curtains and locking their doors in order to be alone, and Billie gives her most restrained and profoundly revealing vocals ever. 4 Ambient Tales is a 4am remedy for the broken hearted, the loney and world-weary, and epitomises her insoucient style of electronic soul.

The lead off track Hearts drifts one as far away from their problems as they can get: imagine Brian Eno meets Cyndi Lauper's True Colours and you are maybe halfway there. Naive and abstractly poignant, it's a dissarming experience with those familiar with the singer who once sang of keeping her lover's soiled panties in a biscuit tin. When Billie sighs 'so calm down' she then sings so gorgeously it is almost paralyzing. She does it again on Planet of The Blue; 'don't doubt me' is as passionate as it is understated. The feeling is that open wounds are being healed here: the hauntingly sung 'Oh let's get carried away boy' has to be the most adorable lyric of her entire disparate songbook, tinged with country regret; whilst 'forget all the everyday scars, tonight we may get a star for you' is secluded and affectionate. Siouxsie Sioux once sang of a 'bridge of sighs', well this is it.

Billie sings with tact, consideration and on I Spent Hours Again (Wishing You Well), even with poker face diplomacy, there is a cathartic sense of closure being achieved. Hours calms the storm, what must be rage is distilled into singing 'I spent hours again wishing you well' almost as if it is a put down, and that she is far too glamorous to lose her composure over a sordid affair. The passivity of the vocal is cleansed completely by the rippling ambience and echo of Tammy Wynette in the form of those arching country guitars shimmering into the moonlight.

House of Love is the most recognisably Billie, sounding as if it could have been an Electribe 101 recording. It is definately the black sheep of the release, probably due to its theme of stalking and gets back into Martin's trademark delight in dysfunction.

Washed up souls are in for a treat - these achingly gorgeous songs ressurect the listener into optimism. Listen to 4 Ambient Tales and the sound will connect you to a life support machine; emotions ripple pensively and you will be deep in peaceful thought long enough to flush those pills down the toilet and face another day. The luminous atmosphere created by these descreet love songs is an experience to behold.

You can buy the CD here.

Home (less) Coming Man

Kylie is not like Dannii: when she hits an all-time low she doesn't speed-dile the local lesbian strip bar like any normal 'do my chunky calves look big in these?' pop star. Realising her faux pas was being snapped by photogs, Kylie quickly covers her tracks and pretends she was only after the latest issue of The Big Issue. You just know the man found a discreet skip and had a wank about the whole thing - at least he had a sleeping bag to cover his modesty. Kylie should just go back to the back pages of Boyz magazine - isn't that how she found big Willy?

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