We all get hurt by love and we all have our cross to bear

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

25/09/94 : Kylie Minogue - Kylie Minogue


Our eighth visit with Kylie (bringing her level with Taylor) and I believe this is one of her better ones, but can't say I'm exactly looking forward to it.

Well, it's definitely not one of the worst ones. The first track, "Confide In Me", is the one I knew best and it's quite representative of the rest of the album because it's a lot more grown-up than her previous work ("look Ma - it's got strings on it!"), her voice is surprisingly strong and it has a pretty decent tune to it. It actually feels like Madonna could have put this on Ray Of Light and it would have fitted in nicely - which is definitely a compliment.

However, it is a bit light on content and that's even before you realise it's 5:51 long - there's a lot of repetition there. And it definitely seems like she believes "longer is more" because the shortest track on the album is 4:25, over half the tracks are over 5:00 long and "Where Has The Love Gone?" is 7:49 - and whilst all of them have pleasing sections, I'm not sure any of them have quite the content to support their length. So I feel there's a decent enough album hiding in here and she's certainly heading in the right direction, but I'm not sure she quite gets there yet.

We're at #4 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a twenty week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five this week were a Luther Vandross covers album (a new entry), a Cyndi Lauper best-of, an Eric Clapton blues cover album (his only #1 album) and The Three Tenors live (that's quite the mix!) and the next highest new entry was Pop Will Eat Itself (#11).

Wikipedia has more on the album than I was expecting (348 milliPeppers) and it tells us that it's her fifth album and the first she made after leaving PWL - her previous album with them did very little and they decided not to renew her contract because she "was [not] moving in a direction that was going to be successful". Wise decision, guys! Kylie took the opportunity to try a few things out with a few people and there were some interesting names in the mix including Saint Etienne, Prince, The Auteurs, The Beloved, Lenny Kravitz, Nick Cave and Bobby Gillespie, but nothing made it on to the album out of these interactions. People who actually were involved were Brothers in Rhythm, M People, Farley & Heller, and Jimmy Harry - most of whom I can tell you absolutely nothing about but they've worked with a LOT of people over the years.

Critically, it was pretty well received with a lot of comments along the lines of "much better than expected" and one of the retrospective reviews compares it favourably with Madonna's Bedtime Stories - it's almost like I know what I'm talking about at times. Commercially, it only really did anything here and in Australia, where it got to #3, but that was obviously enough to stop her career sinking without a trace after PWL.

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent version for a couple of quid but I was very surprised to see a version on sale for £500 - apparently it's rare because it was the first ever release on Totem Records. There's no danger of me spending any amount of cash on it, but there are far worse Kylie albums out there - she just needs to watch the track lengths and I reckon she might have a decent career out of this.

18/09/94 - Yeah, I liked this
02/10/94 - A hat-trick of owned and decent albums

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