Kylie Minogue – Flower
Sometimes, a song about Kylie Minogue’s unborn child is just a creepy, unintentionally erotic song about Kylie Minogue’s unborn child…
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[4.11]
Brad Shoup: Stupefyingly wack. Where have you gone, Natalie Merchant?
[1]
Katherine St Asaph: By now, Kylie has the fanbase to support what’s essentially a Celine Dion song, and I’m sure if I speak against this it means I eat love and shit cynicism and probably hate real music too. Two minor things then. One, considering this is about the miracle of motherhood and oh-so-serious, the press can shut it with the “tantalising glimpse of her naked form” writeups. Two, you can sing this sort of thing breathy or folksy, but not both.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Late Kylie is kind of amazing, isn’t it? This reworking of erotic cliches should be filler on an album of club bangers, but it wraps around itself and appears almost frozen (also “Frozen,” as in the Madonna track).
[7]
Josh Langhoff: I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I’ll bet the kid is really creeped out.
[3]
Alfred Soto: She’s learned a lot about singing since the nineties — the last time she essayed “maturity” like this. The strings and dynamics are the right kind of restraint. I thought she knew more about picking songs though.
[5]
Will Adams: I really don’t know what to say about this baffling choice of a single, so I shall defer to Wikipedia: “PerezHilton.com complimented it as a ‘pretty track.'” Sounds about right.
[4]
Ramzi Awn: Broadway was never my ticket, but between her breaths, Kylie pulls this off with the panache of modern-day Disney. A “Flower” remix might liven things up a bit.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Were this a final track on one of her “credible” albums, I might not always skip back to track one. But as a teaser for an album to come, I can foresee skipping past it. Whatever her strengths as a performer — and technically she’s better than ever — singing from biography has never been one of them.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: Songs about actual children tend to be drippy even at the best of times. Songs about potential children are among the most horrifying productions of late capitalism that exist.
[3]