Take this, America! With a sultry new record, the Aussie dance goddess seals her hold on us

There's more than one official history of Kylie Minogue. In fact, there are a few. The one that most Americans don't really know much about is file one in which the cute young Australian soap opera star appears on the European music scene in 1987 and goes straight to the top of England's pop charts with a cheery little song called "I Should Be So Lucky," perhaps the most blindingly happy song about romantic failure that decade would produce. She stays there, becoming the living embodiment of her record label PWL's somewhat frightening Thatcher-ite slogan "The Sound of a Bright Young Britain." Kyliemania follows in country after country. She's huge, as big as Madonna, a superstar. And she lives on top of that pop chart for 15 years.

The American version is shorter. It includes "Lucky" stalling at number 28 on Billboard's official chart, a shockingly awful cover of "The Loco-Motion" going Top Ten, and then--nothing. She disappears, dropped by Geffen, her American label.

Finally, there's the variation on the American can story, one that plays itself out in gay dance clubs from San Diego to Ogunquit, Maine. It's the one in which she's adopted as the second-most popular gay dance diva of the '90s. She's the cute baby sister who's always smiling, always willing to hang out with her gay brothers as they dance all night. Madonna may have experimented with hair, politics, outfits and sexual provocation, but Kylie didn't. She made dancers happy, her shiny, sound-alike Hi-NRG bubblegum hits spat out like candy from Wonka's Disco Factory. To paraphrase the woman herself, she could be anonymous in the States ff she stayed out of Chelsea, the Castro, or West Hollywood. Then came 2002's Fever, an album that produced the hit "Can't Get You Out of My Head," with its insanely catchy "la la la" chorus. Goodbye, American anonymity. Hello, expectations to keep up the pace.

So what does she do on this, her ninth proper album? She turns into Brigitte Bardot fronting Kraftwerk. This is an older, more mature Kylie. The cute and the catchy have been turned down, the sexy and slinky turned up, her trademark wide-open-mouthed voice transformed into a purr over vibey, downbeat bleeps on "Slow," the single that opens the record. From there it's a deliberate revolt against her bubblegum past, as she chooses instead to reference vintage '80s electro. The songs are darker, harder-edged, and less immediately ingratiating, and singing along by the end of the first listen won't be possible anymore. The songs 'also dabble in a fun game of disco semiotics, dropping lyrical nods to hits as varied as Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round" ("like a record" she offers to one suitor who is, yes, spinning her around) and Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam's "I Wonder ff I Take You Home." It's as though she wants to time-travel back to a disco she didn't dominate and wipe the floor with the competition then too, instilling herself into your memory before you even knew her. And why shouldn't she be allowed to? She's Kylie Minogue, after all. It may take her 15 years to do it, but she gets what she wants in the end.

White writes about film for E! Online.

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