It’s difficult to dislike Kim Wilde, whatever you think of her music. Even more so after her pissed Christmas sing-along on a tube train a few years back became a massive YouTube hit. Or how about her appearance at Download Festival in 2016 with thrash metallers Lawnmower Death? There’s something boisterous and everyday about Kim Wilde. She has that early Spice Girls thing, whether she’s acting raunchy or silly, of being a human woman you might really meet, and who’d be fun, rather than a plastic, photo-shopped, faux-sexy lollipop-head. Her new album, despite its faults, makes her seem even more likeable.
Wilde has retained star status in mainland Europe, especially Germany, but Here Come the Aliens is her first proper crack at the UK market in a couple of decades. It was recorded at RAK studios, where she recorded many of enormous Eighties hits, and alongside her is long-term right-hand man and brother Ricky Wilde at the controls. The result is an ebullient outing, exploding with sugary kicks from the off. The opening cut “1969” is a belting electro-rocker which posits that extra-terrestrials may be our only chance to escape ecological cataclysm ("Maybe they’ll save us from the apocalypse when it comes/A revelation that will really blow our minds”) and things only grow more epic from there.
There are monster pop songs on board, notably the Ritalin rush of “Pop Don’t Stop”, the Duran-alike “Yours Til the End” and the bubblegum heavy rock of “Addicted to You” and “Birthday”. Thump-the-air stadium slowies are also present, notably "Solstice" about a real-life teenage suicide pact, and a preposterously portentous song about online trolling called “Cyber Nation War”. The latter showcases the album's lyrical heavy-handedness. The production falls somewhere between Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Pat Benatar and Wilde’s own early Eighties back catalogue. This power ballad sheen isn’t to my taste but beneath it the quantity of glittery, catchy unabashed pop songs is remarkably high (at least for the first two thirds of the album, after which it rapidly drops off). Kim Wilde is on tour shortly and this lot will make a zippy addition to her performance armoury.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Pop Don't Stop" by Kim Wilde