Let's Get to It

by

Kylie Minogue

Edit

The fourth and last complete album produced by Minogue and her cohorts, Stock and Waterman, is quite possibly her best work to date. The songs have a more sultry and often melancholy sound, which set up the template for her DeConstruction recordings. The album opens with "Word Is Out", complete with a funky hip-hop styled rhythm track and (this time around) real live horns. One particularly good track, "Too Much of a Good Thing", borrows heavily from Lisa Lisa's "Let The Beat Hit 'Em", but is, nonetheless one of the strongest tracks on the album. "Finer Feelings", in its original version here, places our perky Miss Kylie in her first bonafide adult role- "What is love without the finer feelings? It's just sex without the sexual healing..." Glad to see that she has joined the rest of her generation and discovered the joy and pain of the old bump and grind. Her duet with Keith Washington, "If You Were With Me Now", remains one of her brightest moments. It is a lush ballad full of the romantic flourishes and sweeping strings one would expect in a duet. The album closes with a pure throw-away track entitled "I Guess I Like It Like That". There's not much that can be considered original on this track as the title line is directly sampled from a late 80s club track of the same name. The rest of the music was "borrowed" from 2Unlimited's "Get Ready For This", which was signed for release by PWL International, but held for release until a couple months after Minogue's album debuted. Subsequent releases of this song prompted PWL to credit the songwriters as Stock/Waterman/Minogue/DeCoster/Wilde.

Pick this one up... it's a keeper.

LET'S GET TO IT is Kylie Minogue's fourth album, coming hot on the heels of the ground-breaking RHYTHM OF LOVE. This would be the last regular album that Kylie would make for the Stock-Aikman-Waterman production team, and from its texture, it seems that she picked the right time to make her exit. After the sensational RHYTHM, the SAW crew just couldn't keep the energy going, and their frantic album-a-year pace was finally taking its toll. Despite Kylie's increased involvement on the production end--she helped to write six of the songs this time around--this is without a doubt the weakest Minogue effort of all. Too often on LET'S GET TO IT, Kylie comes off as being nothing more than a back-up singer on her own album. In fact, the very last track ("I Guess I Like It Like That") is actually a song by the Visionmasters and Tony King, where she IS a back-up singer on her own album! But even when she's not at the top of her game, Kylie is still formidable, and there are a few gems to be had here. The best of these is "If You Were With Me Now," which she performs with Keith Washington, and remains to date the most beautiful love song she has ever done. Other notables include "Word Is Out," "Finer Feelings," and her cover of "Give Me Just A Little More Time." As all of this album's best tunes can be found on Kylie's GREATEST HITS anthology, you would be better off sticking to that, and only pick up LET'S GET TO IT if you're a completest who simply has to own everything that Kylie Minogue has ever made.