Sturdy!

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[6.88]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s 2015, and the machinations of musical history are such that Giorgio Moroder is a producer who right-here-right-now is putting Foxes on his album. Kylie is a more credentialed choice, but her recent work highlights the same issue latter-day Moroder has: with so much disco and now disco-revival, the line between ersatz and classic, inspired and retromaniac — between emotive abandon and bearskin-rug-louche ’70s — is a blur. Is that Sarah Brightman-esque descant buoyant or schmaltzy? The question is the camp and the point.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: I mean, Kylie makes sense, right? Nobody else has that sort of “dancefloor” serviceability and a reputation for being reliable, to my knowledge. But perhaps it’s Giorgio chasing after what he believes to be what works that keeps this song so unadventurous and uninteresting. It’s so indebted to the concept that Daft Punk have helped him (with those obnoxious talk-box squelches! You’re a vocoder man, Giorgio!) when people have adored and been in awe with him long before that. A shame really, that he’s playing up to the version of himself that he thinks people want him to be.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Inevitable — in 2002 or 1989. Not 1986, though, when Moroder’s infatuation with power chords and F-15s led to Top Gun. Both are way past their peaks. Although Minogue is the most consistent post-disco artist whose work I don’t much play, Moroder is the great disco producer whose last great song was a Phil Oakey collaboration, which means I have nothing at stake in this infectious second tier number. When Minogue’s buoyant squeak harmonizes with a distorted guitar and a rubberband riff that for all I know ended on the cutting room floor during the recording session for “Get Lucky,” every paunchy gay man in Courtyard Marriotts worldwide gets frisky. Watching the world wake up from history indeed.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Swear to God, this is the formula Daft Punk needed: the synths provide the gentle backwards tug, the vocal bass croaks like an obnoxious party guest, and Kylie… well, Kylie may never die. Smart move to subtract the croak when she uncorks a cloudy coo, but it’s an anchor otherwise.
[8]

Anthony Easton: This might be my favouite Kylie song in years, and the return of Moroder is always welcome. It is not self conciously nostalgia, but has a kind of baroque historicism, that is heavily aware of both disco and its children. Extra points for how squelchy and crunchy it is, even more extra points for all of her ooooooooooohs. 
[10]

Jonathan Bogart: Neither of them have any surprises left at this stage in their careers; any popwatcher could guess what this song was going to sound like — helium robo-funk — from a distance of fifty paces. So the pleasure is in the details: the fatness of the synth-bass squelch, the foursquare songwriting as straight down the middle as a Madonna castoff in 1992, the precision whirling of the wordless high bits, still as trusty an illusion of ecstasy as they were back in 1977.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Album track. That’s not a negative in itself — Kylie has had some great album tracks recently — but this has nothing arresting about it, not lyrical, not vocal, not musical. It therefore fails the litmus test of being easy to imagine played on the radio, and if anything the most memorable aspect, the belchy electrogrowls, grate. The Giorgio Moroder comeback remains intriguing and exciting, but this is just passable.
[6]

W.B. Swygart: Sturdy. Kylie spends large stretches parked in the high notes, which (to these ears at least) makes her sound oddly like her sister, conveying excitement largely by getting a bit squeakier. Those bits of fourth-wall breaking she’s so good at aren’t in evidence at all here; it’s all straight, smooth and totally agreeable, without ever setting its sights anywhere beyond that.
[6]