Miss Kittin is a female DJ and one of the main progenitors of
the electroclash movement. Electroclash happened in 2002, and we
all now pretend we never really liked it anyway. After work with
the likes of Felix Da Housecat, Tricky and Chicks on Speed comes
this, her debut solo album. And the results are quite dull. It goes on for a really long time, it’s quite European
and I bet some of you will think it’s really cool. Well, you
will be wrong. You see, Miss Kittin evidently has ambitions of
making a broad, diverse record which bursts out of the realms of
traditional electronica by mixing in some r&b, rock, dub,
soul and ambient noises. Which is fine. But I Com just sounds too damn polite and
conventional. I mean, Miss Kittin, come on, this is your debut
solo album, you should have tried a lot harder and made an album
which blows minds and will be played for years to come.
You’ve let yourself down. The ingredients are there but it’s all just crying out to
be a lot more spiky and exciting and fun. Kittin’s vocals
are thin and weedy. Her detached delivery doesn’t cut it
over a whole album. And the production by world renowned duo GLOVE
is flat and airless. An electronica record needs to sound
outstanding to be noticed in 2004. Too often, the music on this
album sinks into the background and occasionally it verges on bad
Europop. The single, ‘Professional Distortion’ pretends
to rock. On ‘Requiem for a Hit’ Kittin goes a little
blue with the call to “show me your tits and let’s make
a hit.” Most of the songs are steeped in irony, but she does try her
hand at sincerity on what proves to be the album’s emotional
fulcrum ‘Dub About Me’. Over seven gruelingly dull
minutes, Kittin opens her heart and asks, “Baby, what about
me?” She is responded to by a male robotic vocoder. Perhaps
worst of all, with ‘I Come.com’ Kittin gives us a title
which cannot deliver on its innuendo. And that sums the album up for me. It makes gestures to rock,
it attempts humour, it tries to be smart and it assumes
it’ll be the soundtrack to hip parties, but it never quite
gets there. The all too obvious comparison to Miss Kittin is Peaches.
Where Peaches succeeds is her ability to inject her music with
some blood, tits and ass. Judging by this dreary listen, Miss
Kittin has just confused cool with conservatism.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004
Miss Kittin – I Com
