Kylie Minogue - "Tension"

Nothing tense about it

Kylie Minogue is a name you know, even if it doesn’t immediately ring a bell. The now-55-year-old started her career in the late 80s, dropping her debut LP in 1988. Since then, she has become the highest-selling Australian solo artist of all time,¹ played a number of iconic roles in TV and movies (including playing Cammy in the 1994 Street Fighter and the one-off companion, Astrid, in a 2007 Doctor Who special), and now Tension is her 16th full-length LP.

While Minogue is now in her mid-fifties, Tension is a clear testament that she’s nowhere near “done”. She still sounds as youthful and vibrant as ever. The album’s Synth Pop, Dance, and Electropop sounds are consistently fun and energetic. If you’re looking for the best Dance album of the year, the thing that’s going to come as close as possible to the ceaseless energy in last year’s Beyonce release (Renaissance), this is it.

The album starts incredibly strong with “Padam, Padam” (an onomatopoeia word that describes a heartbeat, for those wondering), and is then followed by “Hold On To Now”, which is my personal favorite track on the album. And this early strength is carried through the entire first half of the album, only faltering for a series of tracks early in the second half – I felt that the four-song stretch from “Hands” to “10 Out of 10” (tracks 7-10; for this review, I should note, I listened through the Deluxe version, which includes 14 total tracks) felt a little weaker than the rest of the album.

But even that is relative. Those are still good songs. They just happen to follow six incredibly strong tracks which run back-to-back right from the start. I mean, “Green Light” is a solid modern Disco track with some really sick sax support.

“One More Time” has an incredibly funky bassline; title track “Tension” feels sexy and whimsical in a way that took me by surprise.

And that really feels like the core of the album. Tension doesn’t have any real throughlines – just a thematic core which is all about sex-positivity, consent, and the idea that love and lust aren’t mutually exclusive concepts.

It’s an incredibly fun album, and, honestly, it took me totally by surprise. I’ve never paid much attention to Minogue, and I realize now what a mistake that was.

Rating: Blue

1. This link is full of ‘fun facts’; another good one is that her name has become a collective noun for gay men in Sydney: “a Minogue of gays”