Day 269: Kylie Minogue – Fever
Today I thought I needed a bit of emotional support music, but a very specific variety of it: the type that ladies used to dance to in a circle with their handbags in a pile the middle back in the day, or maybe something you’d see a drag queen perform at Butlins. With Kylie Minogue having her comeuppance at the moment, I thought I’d listen to her classic album Fever - it very neatly fits the bill.
Album cover courtesy of Parlophone
Kylie Minogue, if you’re still unfamiliar, is the Australian Princess of Pop who first made a name for herself as an actress on the Australian soap opera Neighbours – a spring board for many other Aussie legends, like Margot Robbie, the Hemsworth brothers and Russell Crowe – but she pivoted to music in 1987, releasing classic songs of bubblegum pop at the time. Since then, she’s forged a varied and successful career and become established as a pop star who’s always able to reinvent herself.
Kylie famously goes through phases, from Indie Kylie to Disco Kylie to Country Kylie to whatever else, and Fever was released in 2001 when she was firmly in the Disco Kylie era, with a bit of Euro-dance peppered in. It has some of her most iconic songs, like "Can't Get You Out of My Head", "Come into My World” and “Love at First Sight”. At the time, Fever was a huge commercial success, peaking at number one in Australia, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Russia, and the UK.
This isn’t a new album for me by any stretch – I’m a Kylie lover, I have been since I was a kid. I remember a few years ago listening to some of her older stuff, maybe her 2007 album X, and thinking she was so ahead of her time, and that kids these days would love it. Then she released Tension in 2023 and started gaining a younger audience, and now that her Netflix documentary is out it feels like she’s having a full-on career renaissance.
I also always thought it was strange that she never really broke America when she was so massive elsewhere, but I guess the American mind 20-something years ago could not comprehend “Spinning Around”, or even a classic like “The Loco-Motion” earlier than that. But better late than never, and it’s so nice to see a pop star reach new heights at 58 years old after 38 years in the business.
The beginning of this album is essentially banger after banger, the most unappreciated one being the titular track “Fever”. Then it mellows out pretty considerably by the end, with something like “Dancefloor” and “Love Affair” representing the weaker end of the record. But by no stretch is it bad when it’s worse, it’s just a bit more generic after the momentum that’s gained in the first four songs. It feels like there’s songs that only Kylie could have done like she did at the top end of the album, but by the end it’s songs that could have been done by a great few other artist.
One thing I noticed when listening to this is that she seems to occasionally have taken the Euro-disco thing so far that she has some sort of an accent – there’s definitely a few occasions where she sounds less Aussie and more Eastern European in her pronunciation. But Kylie can do no wrong for all I care, she could pivot to being full-on Lithuanian Kylie for her next phase and I’d have nothing to say about it.
Some songs on Fever are Kylie at a career peak and others are fine, if not a bit generic. It’d be a 9 or a 9.5 if the momentum hadn’t died down so much at the end, but it’s still a good album from one of pop’s all-time greats. If you’re new to Kylie, start here. 8.5/10.