Xtina's folly here, allegedly, was high ambition. I would instead contend that it was a tendency to lazily ape her contemporaries - particularly Stefani and shades of M.I.A - without really having the kind of swagger or charisma that makes those two performers so captivating at this point in time. As a result, this just squelches and shrieks until you can stand it no longer.

All of this would be forgivable if this actually did push the boat out as much as everyone says it does creatively, ... read more

The best material was all on the singles and/or the songs that were not, ostensibly, album singles until they were.

The deep cuts on this aren't dance euphoria, nor much of anything else, really.

Still, that one Kylie track and Serotonin Moonbeams are both absolutely delicious, and there are some other ok cuts too.

Madge with all the pep, energy, and hunger of her self-titled, but with more of the wink-wink and the ability to reshape and redefine the cultural conversation that has since stayed with her for most of her career since.

It's pretty standard and baseline for a superstardom-launcher, to be honest. Nothing on here is particularly poor, but not all of it is as totemic as the status this album had in pop-culture in the mid-eighties would suggest - outside of the singles, anyway, which *still* ... read more

Really really wish you could just post a photo instead of a text review on this site so I could use the screenshot of the Madonna and Hillary animated Girls Gone Wild tweet.

Anyway yeah I mean what is there to say? Girl Gone Wild is the highest point on this album and it is so blatantly derivative of everything in the realm of electro-dance-pop around this time that it makes you kind of chortle at the idea that this woman had successfully played against type with a fucking trance-trip-hop ... read more

Not a total disaster, but rather, just blander, safer, and far less intriguing than almost anything else Madonna has really ever done before this point, or even *after* this point. Though Illuminati does *really* stink.

Thankfully, at least the singles slap - with one exception: I suppose Madge is entitled to the enormous "Bitch I'm" flex on this album by 2015, but it is a pretty rare total miss on SOPHIE's production resume.

Oh, thank *god*. Yes, this is still formulaic SAW for the nineties. But you can feel some of Kylie's actual fingerprints on this one, and it at least contains some *groove* and feels less forced-smile than her previous two efforts.

You can actually listen to this one in a sitting without viscerally cringing, and it has an infectious energy to it in the singles that is potent, even if the results sometimes tend toward the forgettable - and even if it feels clear that everyone involved ... read more

At the end of the 1980s, British music mag Melody Maker printed a poll of readers thoughts on the decade. Two findings stuck out to me.

1: Kylie came up a few times:

"Worst Influence On The Eighties" - #15th
"Biggest Surprise Of The Eighties" - "Kylie's Success" - #5

And 2: so did her main producers at around this time, the ever-formulaic Stock, Aitken, and Waterman (SAW):

"Biggest Surprise Of The Eighties": Success of SAW - #6
"Hope For The ... read more

A genuine marvel to me that, half a decade ago, we were getting some shoegazey soft-grit and sparks of ethereal brilliance on tracks like "Turned Out I Was Everyone" (which, to date, is her single biggest accomplishment in her career as a solo musician), the decently effective "Morning Comes", and a better version of what we just now got from her in "Adult Contemporary".

This album, in retrospect, was not as grand as I had remembered it when I encountered it the ... read more

After an utterly dismal pair of formulaic backwash records from BLACKPINKs ROSE and LISA, it is an absolute relief to see an album from this group that someone actually gave a shit about beyond thinly sketched concepts.

Is it the year's masterpiece? No. But I have to give JENNIE her props. "like JENNIE" was the first song across the three albums so far to really capture my attention for the better, the features here pop off hard *especially* in Doechii's case, and with ... read more

One of the most overhyped albums this century, I'm afraid. The front-end packs a wallop, and I'm content with earmarking "How High" as a jewel in this tiara, but Madonna's dancefloor for half of the album is the safest it had ever been at this point, and "I Love New York" and "Forbidden Love" are both cuts that outright stink with poor vocal performances and production choices that chafe against themselves. Push, too, could've done with being ... read more

This is Timbaland's album, really. Though Timbaland by 2008 did still have it in him to make a decent enough album, this is hits and misses all over the board. Candy Shop smashes, Incredible crashes. 4 Minutes is a Timba-lakian godsend, Spanish Lesson might be one of the worst cuts Madge has ever appeared on. Et cetera.

Ultimately, I think this album tilts more towards "single-heavy; discardable otherwise" and some of the most revered pop albums of the last 20 years (cough ... read more

When taken as an autobiographical work by the world's then-leading professional narcissist, rather than the totemic anti-Bush sledgehammer she'd told everyone it kinda sorta might be, this is fine. Especially when she's moving on from Double Shottay raps and into electroclash diatribes about her long-standing daddy issues or the fragility of her own identity.

A singular, brilliant, out-of-the box reinvention for pop music's great survivor, and a radical shift to mark the end of a creatively triumphant trilogy that began with 1992's sleazy bed-rocking "Erotica".

pretty nuts how between the ai cover, the bleh songwriting, and the bland sound, this single managed to almost immediately piss away the hype kesha had coming off of joyride.

TLDR: Some gems, but roughly 55% of this is B O R I N G, low-risk, and generic. And Gaga slapping DWaS on it is kinda shameless.

EDIT: Knocked down from a 70 to a 68 to a 65 to a 60 on relistens.

Abracadabra was pretty killer but 3-through-5 did not catch my ear at all and only when I heard "Killah" did I think "ooh, this might be interesting". Fascinated because Gaga takes a lot of her love for that 80s aesthetic and, if we're being honest, the blatant love affair ... read more

The versatile ex-Glazerr-er has tried her hand at grunge, metal, elements of industrial, and she's decided to lend her talents to new creative pursuits: boring, comparatively radio-friendly rock ballads and low-intensity pop-adjacent stuff you'll forget about in two months.

Granted, there is a Seed (see what I did there? Okay, I'll get out.) of the stuff that first piqued my interest in 2019 featuring as the album closer, and I am a fan of the time-hoppy sound on For The Weekend ... read more

this *really* isn't the sasami of her self-titled or of squeeze, is it. gone is almost any sense of abrasiveness, punch, or fire. on the eve of her LP being fully released, the softening of all the edges here and loss of a lot of the highs signals, to me, a pretty serious attempt at selling out - which itself would be *fine* if the result didn't feel so goopy and insubstantial.

wallpaper. could've been spun off by just about any contemporary singer-songwriter bigshot and it would, justifiably, be labelled bland. hoping the album is not all in this direction because this really is a downgrade on her last two lps sonically. woof.

Ms. Q does not have an enormous amount of power or range vocally across this record, which means a lot of the heavy-lifting is left to the gruel-thin synth lines. The ballads that rest primarily on her shoulders are snoozy emotionless disasters, as a result, and the highest watermark you wind up reaching is a kind of tentative foot-tapping.

In summary: If you've heard Two of Hearts, We Connect, or Insecurity before, that really *is* the best this album gets, and those are only okay. Love ... read more

a bloated project so reliant on evoking a laugh instead of sounding good or novel does not then get to whiff the assignment lyrically like this.

quite possible that i'm too old for this. but then, if 24 is a barrier-to-entry, that feels like a bigger issue with the range of the artists.

favs: dancing on your grave, special