Showgirl documents an event that was carefully constructed as a sort of a comeback for Kylie Minogue following her year-plus absence from the spotlight due to a battle with breast cancer. The November 2006 show took place in Minogue’s native Australia, in Sydney — which, not-so-coincidentally, had also been the venue for Minogue’s only previous live album, 1998’s Intimate and Live. It was designed to take Minogue’s reputation for full-out stage extravaganzas to its logical extreme, featuring a bewildering variety of costume changes, dancers, and set pieces (the CD is divided into seven “acts,” along with an encore). The set list too, is eminently predictable, featuring all of Kylie’s biggest hits, but with a special emphasis on her last three albums (Light Years, Fever, and Body Language), to remind the listener that, at the time of Kylie’s forced absence, she was essentially at the peak of her popularity.
It’s not really the same show when stripped of the visuals for CD purposes. Nonetheless, it comes across as the work of a consummate professional, someone who’s fully comfortable on stage and in this music. Her ability to work an audience remains excellent, a point that the CD emphasizes by mixing the crowd noise extremely loud. Significantly, Kylie’s in much better voice than she was on Intimate and Live. It’s long been fashionable in certain circles to denigrate Kylie’s vocal ability, but if she’s never going to be mistaken for Gladys Knight, she’s more than the equal of, say, Madonna, and worlds ahead of, oh, Britney Spears. On Showgirl, she sounds energetic, forceful, and fully engaged in the music.
Although the introductions are often tweaked slightly — there’s a languid piano-driven lead-in to “On a Night Like This,” and the sitars and violins that start out “Confide in Me” are stretched out far beyond their normal length (undoubtedly to cover up the costume change), the bulk of the arrangements, particularly on the first disc, are treated with a certain reverence. This is true despite the fact that an awful lot of medley-izing has been done, particularly in the middle sections, in order to fit more songs in the allotted time. (As a side note, some of the choices of what songs to put with each other are questionable at best: putting snatches of “Where the Wild Roses Grow” in the middle of “Red Blooded Woman” is less of a medley and more of a car crash.) Kylie normally displays a willingness to rework her material almost to the point of distraction, but there are only a few radical rearrangements on display here, all on the second disc: the rethinking of “Come Into My World” as a music-box ballad, a clever pasting of the lyrics to “Hand On Your Heart” over the backing music to “Love At First Sight,” and a strip-club version of “The Loco-Motion” that indicates that, even in her rejuvenated career, Kylie’s never going to play that song at full tempo again. The overall fidelity to the recorded versions works well enough in the context of a celebration of Kylie’s career, but it does mean that fans listening to this disc at home might feel like they’ve heard this material before.
On the bright side, there is one new song that Kylie’s brought out for the occasion. “White Diamond” is certainly of a piece with the last material that Kylie brought out before her absence (in particular, the synths sound an awful lot like the ones on “I Believe in You,” one of the new songs that were tacked onto the 2004 Ultimate Kylie collection). But it’s got a great chorus, and the modal melody takes the best aspects of the Deconstruction-era albums and inserts it seamlessly into her current sound. If it’s indicative of what’s going to show up on a new album, I’m excited already. (Not as though I wouldn’t have been anyway. I suppose my love of Kylie’s work is pretty well-documented by this point.)
I’m not giving this a higher rating solely and only because it’s not essential — if you want to hear these songs (and you should!), the studio versions remain the definitive ones. But for what it was intended to do — serve as a compendium and a notice of return — it’s difficult to imagine how Showgirl could have done any better, at least in the CD format.
UK release date: Jan. 8, 2007
Label: Parlophone
Rating: 7/10
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