Kylie Minogue: Fever : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Kylie Minogue is known in America only through her Moulin Rouge cameo as the Green Fairy and her first single, a ghastly 1988 rendition of "The Loco-Motion." But elsewhere, the Australian long ago joined the ranks of one-name superstars: In England alone she has reached the Top Twenty some thirty-odd times. Like Madonna and Janet, Kylie can't wail across five octaves, but she's got severely coquettish charm and an alchemist's way with a disposable lyric. Fever, her eighth and most consistently discotronic disc, is fast, full of old-fashioned hooks and newfangled techno hiccups, campy as a tent full of Boy Scouts and yet easy on the cheese. Combining Ann-Margret's sex-kitten snarl with Daft Punk's android sparkle, the self-descriptive first single, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is, like the album's eleven similar tracks, willfully plastic and yet perversely personable. Kylie is a perfect pop singer, because she can tickle the world even as she seems to sing her songs of dance-floor desire for your ears only.