straightorbroken
rebel heart
The sheer momentous opulence of Gina G's iconic Fresh! album was impossible to top. The fact that the strawberry blonde singer never got her shot to try is besides the point - combining coquetish glamour with radiant drag-identified femininity and serving it with rampant, frothy Hi-NRG signified a unique liberation for camp gays everywhere. Hook subsiding meaning notwithstanding, Gina's girly but never quite trite delivery always expressing erotic longing, an insatiable appetite for admiring hot boys, energetic distress and hair-tossing abandon on the G-A-Y stage for years to come.
Camp emergency siren Ooh Ahh ... Just A Little Bit is every bit as gushing as I'm In The Mood For Dancing or Kelly Marie's Feels Like I'm In Love especially, but far more exuberant. Like those other singles, the song is uncoverable - it remains the singers heartbeat-skipping theme tune whether she likes it or not. The kinetic production travels fast, the beats violating your right for consent. The frolicsome, giddy carnage wouldn't mean a thing without Gina sucking us right in: 'you're my love, you're my sweetest thing' is delivered before you can catch your breath.
The title-track Fresh! with airy pants-off panting and a rippling guitar riff, all deliberately echoing a jingle with 1950s catchprasing, conveying bathing suit glamour in heels. The funky Bayside Boys remix yanks the Macarena bassline from under your feet and it's a perfect fit for those revolving 'whoooh-oh-oh-whoah-oh-oh' bits. It's ageing worse than Julie Goodyear in HD though, but I still love this one.
Flemenco flutterer Ti Amo bats its lashes in the direction of La Isla Bonita, applying an extra layer of pining euro-pop fantasia. The more bombastic Bayside Boys, more fiesty Basstown, and more better Metro 'Summer of Love' edits infinitely indulge the romantic sense of getting pregnant in Ibiza.
Just like her fans, Everytime I Fall is helplessly passive. The Todd Terry radio edit and Metro remix offer the song's definative experiences. Follow The Light doesn't quite erupt into a poppers o'clock banger, but Gina's sense of direction is worth listening to even if it might get you run over.
The immodestly hormonal dispersal of Gimme Some Love is standard fare gear-shifting Hi-NRG, no more no less, but the Eurobeat single edit remedies this with a flush of sweeping whoooshing disco lubrication. The perfect vehicle for a swift vocal style that craves a fast melody so you don't have to think about its limitations too much.
The ecstatic disco heart-attack Rhythm of My Life, compels a lapse in diplomacy when Gina blurts out 'my brother doesn't like you, my sister thinks you're cool' which is on par with the magnificently pugnacious opening line to Jellyhead By Crush ('so what if your jeans are torn, they've been torn since Bros were cool'). Manufactured from Motiv8's already existing Rocking For Myself, one can't hold it against Gina when she's on particularly forthcoming form.
The sumptuous I Belong To You glides with glossy production wherein her unquenchable desire accommodates Roadways surfing electronica, as she blushes, 'like a river to the sea'. The telegraphic precision of the lyrics, usurping jaccuzzi of eurodance, and Gina's heartwarming reassureance all equal a nervous overload of vanishing point euphoria. Gina's cool, brittle and enticing vocals hyperventalate once more on the anthemic Higher Than Love. One of the many opportunities for a single.
On an album largely consumed by an inability to control one's emotions around other hot people, Gina's cautious guard on the wintry mid-tempo ballad It Doesn't Mean Goodbye is the only song where she seems to reveal a genuine human being beyond the killer hook and killer heels. Not merely pretty (which it most definately is), the singer's inner turmoil is illuminated by beaming synths sharply ignited with a tender melancholy. It's an ironic send off given her subsequent career nosedive, and whenever I hear Gina's final whisper 'it doesn't mean goodbye' I can't help but cry out loud 'oh but it did Gina'. The track plays on her best qualities - her perfumey voice creates a genuine mist of pathos, searching for answers.
Gina's Fresh! surpasses most greatest hit compilations.
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