Kylie Minogue ”Better Than Today”It’s a little slice of 1980s heaven: Back-up girls wearing hot pink wigs for shoulder pads! Back-up boys in Robert Palmer suits and Pac-Man helmets, wielding key-tars against a backdrop of Wham-ian block lettering and Atari 2600 level video game graphics of pixelated monsters gobbling up pellets. All the while, our heroine cockteases a small army of Marshall amps. Oops. Pardon me, I’m drooling. (The keytars, people, the keytars.) Did I mention the song’s pretty good too? It’s “Better Than Today”, the third single from Kylie Minogue‘s super-awesome Aphrodite album, which might’ve been a shoo-in for the best dance-pop record of the year, had Robyn not gone totally over-achiever on all our asses.
Pet Shop Boys ”Together”The last couple of years have been great for the veteran synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys – lead singer Neil Tennant and everything-else-guy Chris Lowe. In 2009, 25 years into their career, they released Yes, one of their best (and happiest sounding) albums ever, and they followed it up with a very retro retrospective tour, documented in the live album and DVD Pandemonium released earlier this year. Now they’re getting set to put out a new greatest hits collection.
The set’s called Ultimate and though the track-list leaves much to be desired, treading ground already well-documented in two previous compilations (1991’s essential Discography, and 2003’s massive PopArt), it does pick up one track each (definitely not enough) from their two most recent studio albums, and adds a new single, called “Together”. It’s a fine song, but hardly enough to justify buying another greatest hits CD. Chris and Neil largely cede the stage in the song’s video to two dueling gangs of dancers in a depressed looking workaday Russian (?) hamlet. It’s street toughs vs. a flock of ballerinas, who after an initial battle, teach each other their moves, hit the discos, and then put on a big show! Huzzah for Kinetic Young People! (The Pet Shop Boys make a couple of cameos, one at the beginning in costumes – Chris in his usual sunglasses, Neil with his usual big dog – and then again at the end looking on from the wings of the stage.)
Hot Chip, Bernard Sumner and Hot City ”Didn’t Know What Love Was”I’m loving Hot Chip right now. In February, this very nerdy, London-based indie electropop quintet which formed around childhood friends Alexis Taylor (the skinny one with the glasses) and Joe Goddard (the chunky one with the beard), released their fifth full-length album One Life Stand.
It’s one of my favorite records of 2010, full of sweetly sincere love songs about marriage and family, only set to synthesizer sounds and blippity beats stolen from thirty-year-old records by Kraftwerk and Heaven 17. But Hot Chip’s latest single isn’t from the album. It’s a collaboration with New Order singer Bernard Sumner and London house music duo Hot City called “Didn’t Know What Love Was”; and it was commissioned by Converse (as in the shoes) who, like Levi’s Jeans, have been giving me plenty of reason to hang out at their website for reasons other than interest in their product. (Converse recently opened its own recording studio in Brooklyn!)
You can (and should) download – for free – the “maxi-single” of the song, featuring four different mixes, at Converse’s website. It’s a good old-fashioned Madchester house anthem that sounds like the proper follow-up to the 1990 hit “Getting Away With It” by Electronic, Sumner’s on-again-off-again collaboration with Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. I keep expecting Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant to pipe in with the background vocals. And as if to prove this project was no cheap fling, an official music video for the single was released last week, and – well, it’s pretty wonderful. See it here:
