Ultimate Pop Star Countdown: 20-16

16.   Prince – Gold

Quite grand and pompous, but it’s completely mesmerizing, a soft-rock renewal awash with pristine pop shimmers.  It’s no surprise he covered Joan Osborne’s One of Us – they sort of (lyrically at least) burn from the same candle. That was NOT a waxing lyrical pun I promise.

17.   Eurythmics – Beethoven (I Love To Listen)

Pyscho meets Donna Summer.   From its violent throbbing intro, to the unhinged rapture of it all, lyrics splatter like blood and Annie’s razor-blade delirium would almost be upsetting if it weren’t so mind-blowing. The home-wrecker/home-maker violations and schizophrenia is rooted in glamour, angst and desperation: the manic, seething turbulence of Beethoven is such a dizzying height the album threatens to implode in itself on the very first track.

18.   Billie Ray Martin – Hearts / Where Fools Rush In

Ambient and lush, Billie’s song is shy to be heard and ripples like the reflection of moonlight. Hushing “calm down” has to be the softest emotion I’ve ever heard from anyone’s voice.

19.   Smashing Pumpkins – Perfect

Serene and pensive, Billy’s voice tenderly bristles and we even get to hear D’arcy.  It’s hook is not as obvious as 1979, but their ink is leaking from the same pen.

20.   Alexia – Uh La La La (Almighty UK Radio Edit)

Hearing this on the Pepsi Chart, and then changing channel to Radio 1’s own top 40 coundown straight away (there was always a 1 song delay between both), I was sure Alexia was Jocelyn Brown's 55 stone sister having the time of her life before having cardiac arrest. I wanted in on the fun. It actually came BEFORE Spice Up Your Life, a stampede of piano keys and a voice that sounded like she was bound to have lipstick on her teeth – loud, brassy and just fabulous.

The Opiates - Hollywood Under The Knife (2011)

Drenched in decadence and atmospheric eloquence, The Opiates debut album Hollywood Under The Knife marks the legendary singer Billie Ray Martin's first album since her soul-enriching 2001 solo set Eighteen Carat Garbage. Her partner in crime and co-producer is Robert Solheim who filters the singer's unmistakably soulful voice (in turns plaintive, expressive, rueful and sometimes plain paranoid) through electronic veils, dramatic guises and a disturbing clatter of upscale arrangements.

The pulsating, sole uptempo Reality TV originally took shape as a demo submitted for consideration to go on Britney's Blackout album.  Lyrically, Billie bites a little too close to to the bone to the Britney breakdown for this to have been realistically included on a Spears album.  And thank god.  It ranks among Martin's highest pop peaks. So much so I can only imagine holding it back for a future Billie solo album proved too hard to not share.  Soldhiem perfectly spikes Billie's exquisitely prescription-pumped ballad-as-pop-song with electronic tinkles like a beard made from fragments of ice, tailoring it with the synth-pop equivalent of luxuriously gaudy sequins.

It is a song that fits in with Billie's winning batch of electro-disco or otherwise just plain outstanding singles from 2003-5: the manic head-rush and disorientating vanishing-point disco of No Brakes On My Rollerskates (experience your feet feel as if they've left the ground), the panting prostitute anthem Twisted Lover ("I'm all tied up, not strings attached"), the gelid-eyed gutter diva moment of Bright Lights Fading (where she wants to "spend my royalties on poor boys"), the murky Elvis tribute Dead Again, the seething orgasm of all available orifices Undisco Me and the smoldering and morbidly chic Je Regrette Everything (one can only hope the singer scoops these incredible songs together for an eventual solo album). Reality TV transmits a broody and no less euphoric energy that isn't replicated anywhere else. Tinkling like watery salts and electronic silver metals, Billie almost sings sweetly about the morose subject matter of fame's extreme and irresistible torment.

The album opens like an oozing mist with the somber-probably-not-sober Rainy Days and Saturdays. Billie's plaintive, solitary and taut emotional expressionism is complimented with a sparse ambiance that captures the poignancy of private inspection, long-lasting ennui and rueful loneliness. The beauty builds largely due to the singer's expert, or resigned, restraint.

The seductively strange Silent Comes The Night is arguably the album's peak of alienation, with the creepy whispers about watching too much TV generating an odd, unhinged exotica.  Clattery. Floorboard-creaking. Viciously reclusive. Perfectly shaded. This is what being the old lady expertly looking out her window behind the vintage 80s Venetian blinds at night time might sound like.  Like Reality TV, it was also initially scheduled for her own solo album and not surprisingly is another stand out.

Atmosphere-swept Dinah & The Beautiful Blue caught me completely off guard.  Like a cool night-time breeze hitting you at just the right moment with just the right view, I had to pause and silence everything both during and after it just to appreciate what I was had just gone through.  This album is very stylistic, but here the tension has been released. Startlingly sparse and yet emotionally huge. Sadness as a privilege. It must take a huge heart to feel this sad.  The remains of the album are percolating discoid-driven affairs or more gradual, guarded items where Billie offers yet more expensive secrets, drama-queen paranoia and tranquil tenderness.

The Opiates are largely geared towards an aesthetic of self-scrutiny through a careful lens of perfection-craving, a diet of the finest Depeche Mode album tracks and both a glinting and detached sardonic commentary on Hollywood as a subtle concept to hinge these elegantly mysterious songs onto. The album may be too dimly-lit for its own good for some, but this is not a Billie solo album and in the understanding of the duo's ambiguous agenda is a sculpted masterpiece aiming to be appreciated in the most perverse ways possible. As Siouxsie Sioux once sang, "transfixed by the inner sound".  Buy this album without delay.

Rating:

9/10

The Opiates - Hollywood Under The Knife

Above: Britney Spears may have turned down Reality TV, but Billie still managed to snatch her wig.

Billie Ray Martin is all set to release her long-awaited Opiates album called Hollywood Under The Knife.  To say it has been hard work for her to get to this stage would be an understatement, the project clearly means a lot to her and Diva Incarnate cannot wait to hear it all. Personally, I have stayed away from hearing snippets as I want this to be a fresh experience. The song Reality TV (Lonely, Lonely Girl) has been a huge favourite for a few years now, and was first touted to Britney of all people back in 2007! The song is definately pop, but Billie has a voice that cannot be covered and I would never be satisfied hearing anyone else sing her song first.  BRM also submitted a proper pop song to Dannii Minogue's older sister Kylie called Sattelite, so fingers crossed we get that on an eventual Billie Ray Martin solo album, which is promised.  The album Hollywood Under The Knife is out 17.10.11 preceded by an EP 19.09.11. These can be pre-ordered on iTunes now.

Billie Ray Martin - Sweet Suburban Disco

Gutter-glam electro madamme Billie Ray Martin's seething sensations continue to beguile as the German techno-Dusty/Dietrich dance diva and balladeer extraordinare treated and tweeted her faithful fans to a free download. Previewing a hefty remix package due on the 28th next month, the murky shades of Oriental mistique meets no Berlin disco sauna dark room in particular of Sweet Suburban Disco is a faster Bright Lights Fading - if it got anymore sleazy the artwork would need to feature a sling. Ever the play-it-safe lyricist, "she counts her blisters like every party she's ever missed" could be complexion-perfection or sinister botched surgery with the visible staples to match. Grimacing with narcacistic stoicism, "the pain still lingers on" is something of an addiction as dwelling on such neon-lightedness is nothing she hasn't done before. I just hope she challenges herself a bit more, but this is dependably Billie. Co-produced by Mike Vamp of Berlin-based electronic dance whores Märtini Brös, Vince Clarke of Erasure is on remix duty alongside Severino, Luke Solomon and Ray Grant. 2011 is set to be a very active year for the singer who has not released a studio album since 2001's outstanding Eighteen Carat Garbage: her long-awaited solo album is set for release at some point, her long-awaited Opiates album is set for release whenever it happens, and a collaboration with Hard Ton will probably see the light of day whenever that happens as well. Billie will also tour with Lady Gaga in 2020 if she can "find a minute to even think."

Download.

Billie Drops A Bomb

Moody and atmospheric, Billie Ray Martin has leaked a new song On Borrowed Time, borrowing very much the same fame-identified morbitity as her own Bright Lights Fading and especially Je Regrette Everything. Fantastic to hear her goul on a track that could be Massive Attack circa 1998. I can't wait for the big pop moments promised, but love the richness here. Classy, low-key and appalled. It's inspired by Andy Warhol.

You can hear the track here.

Billie Ray Martin - Systems of Silence (Jr. Vasquez Remix)

Dance might insist its own functionality, and for barely-functioning-anyway Billie Ray Martin it is not hard to imagine that her biggest hit (some say only one) Your Loving Arms leaves the impression that nightclubbing rewards were her natural reportoire. But in fact, her debut album Deadline For My Memories was more Dusty Springfield meets Everything But The Girl than playing any part in 1995s throbbing soundtrack of Grace, Livin' Joy and Strike. Billie's sophisticated vision of electronic soul was far more expressive than her peers, and the singer's 4 Ambient Tales e.p was positively unconciousl and still. However, when committed to dealing with her one-hit-wonder reputation as a disco diva, which was a tremendous up when she was, she was a force to be reckoned with. The cool melancholy tingeing Honey made it the hit that never was, but from her own (admittedly cheapskate) In Memphis record, the brilliantly titled Eighteen Carat Garbage, an introverted drum n' bass influenced cut called Systems of Silence was given a gigantic remix by none other than Jr. Vasquez and can be found on her remix disc Recycled Garbage. Going about its elegant 9 minute opus business of sounding nothing like the album it came from, it is given such a grandiose setting that Martin's chillingly seductive paranoia inspires the kind of distaste and fear only George Orwell could match if he penned a song for Grace Jones (hear her scream that middle-eight). Swathed in a storm of Hi-NRG tumult, Billie's German diva gestalt reinforces her unnering kinesthetic, whilst Vasquez renders the session phantasmagoric. Cinematic, thrilling and terrifying, 2:28 is when the smouldering vocal enters the picture.

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Billie Ray Martin's Latest Fan-Release

It's here! For some silly reason DJ Hell's new collaboration with Billie Ray Martin, Silver Machine, only appears on the Japanese edition of his most recent album Teufelswerk. The cheek!

It's another mouth-foaming bat-cave vocal from the scary German goddess - actually she is not scary, Diva Incarnate was personally priviledged when grabbed from off the floor by her at a gig (sadly not whilst singing 'pick me up off the floor and out me in your show tonight, I was born for the bright spotlight' from Bright Lights Fading, which was in the set).

On Machine the tears won't well up, but if you wait you just might get goosebumps: she doesn't go all Aretha until well into 3 minutes, but Martin keeps you waiting just the way she wants. And what we really want of course, is a follow-up album to 2001's masterpeice Eighteen Carat Garbage - I still remember getting that album for Christmas, to have Billie's Elvis jumpsuit artwork in my hands was my favourite present that year.

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Billie Wants To Screw Her Life Up

Unexpectedly, the baptizing Aquax Radio edit of Where Fools Rush In by 'Dietrich of techno' Billie Ray Martin ripples to the surface and sounds like a lost goose-bumps worthy Dannii Minogue remix from the Australian's plaintive still-on-the-pedastal Girl era. Sublime in other words, and her healthy stamina for heartache aches like never before.

The sensational whirlpool trance sucks you right in, and the cleansing cloud-skimming sense of weightlessness proves the perfect setting for the singer's soft vocal restraint, which trembles for the chance to screw her life up and have her heart broken for real this time. The sheer thrill of hearing a song that could be the Supremes in their vintage 60s hip-clapping peak now given the type of dance treatment fans of Your Loving Arms might appreciate takes advantage with gushing lyrics, of which flow like a running tap, and create something breathtakingly introverted and redemptive. The original's doo-wop eggshell exterior is a wistful classic, but I just cannot sober up from the immersing distilled trance raining into my ears from this remix.

Above: I was actually right at the front when Billie bled for us at Karbon nightclub in Glasgow - I was pushed to the ground due to my ecstatic dancing, but it was my honor to be picked off the floor by Billie herself (not unlike the lyric to Bright Lights Fading no less).

'And when it's over will there be a next chance' is an uncharacteristically doe-eyed lyric from Billie, but her rueful sense of contol is very much behind the steering wheel here. Billie's lisp is even more vulnerable, and it is the first time she has been this exposed, sounding so clearly enthused by love and, clutch your pearls boys, optimism!

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Delight In Dysfunction

Billie Ray Martin's largely undiscovered 1994 collaboration with the Grid, an E.P titled 4 Ambient Tales, remains her most romantic and impressionistic to date. Unfairly, Martin is largely remembered as the singer of the circumstantially faceless trance love song Your Loving Arms (a genuine international hit single), or from Electribe 101 who had even less success yet left a critical legacy not to be overlooked. The fact that her back catalogue is a curious condition of scattered collaborations (often unreleased) and a mere 2 albums, is a major betrayal of a singer her fans consider to be the most expressive soul singer since Dusty Springfield ('the Dietrich of techno' is another odd yet apt description).

Often overspilling in a knowingly perverse thrill over the melodrama she sings of (hear her scream 'there is a body on the floor that looks like me' on the ballad Deadline For My Memories and you will worry that she would have needed a strait-jacket afterwards), Billie sings truthfully nevertheless and always avoids the cliches of her genre. Here, this is the sound of someone closing their curtains and locking their doors in order to be alone, and Billie gives her most restrained and profoundly revealing vocals ever. 4 Ambient Tales is a 4am remedy for the broken hearted, the loney and world-weary, and epitomises her insoucient style of electronic soul.

The lead off track Hearts drifts one as far away from their problems as they can get: imagine Brian Eno meets Cyndi Lauper's True Colours and you are maybe halfway there. Naive and abstractly poignant, it's a dissarming experience with those familiar with the singer who once sang of keeping her lover's soiled panties in a biscuit tin. When Billie sighs 'so calm down' she then sings so gorgeously it is almost paralyzing. She does it again on Planet of The Blue; 'don't doubt me' is as passionate as it is understated. The feeling is that open wounds are being healed here: the hauntingly sung 'Oh let's get carried away boy' has to be the most adorable lyric of her entire disparate songbook, tinged with country regret; whilst 'forget all the everyday scars, tonight we may get a star for you' is secluded and affectionate. Siouxsie Sioux once sang of a 'bridge of sighs', well this is it.

Billie sings with tact, consideration and on I Spent Hours Again (Wishing You Well), even with poker face diplomacy, there is a cathartic sense of closure being achieved. Hours calms the storm, what must be rage is distilled into singing 'I spent hours again wishing you well' almost as if it is a put down, and that she is far too glamorous to lose her composure over a sordid affair. The passivity of the vocal is cleansed completely by the rippling ambience and echo of Tammy Wynette in the form of those arching country guitars shimmering into the moonlight.

House of Love is the most recognisably Billie, sounding as if it could have been an Electribe 101 recording. It is definately the black sheep of the release, probably due to its theme of stalking and gets back into Martin's trademark delight in dysfunction.

Washed up souls are in for a treat - these achingly gorgeous songs ressurect the listener into optimism. Listen to 4 Ambient Tales and the sound will connect you to a life support machine; emotions ripple pensively and you will be deep in peaceful thought long enough to flush those pills down the toilet and face another day. The luminous atmosphere created by these descreet love songs is an experience to behold.

You can buy the CD here.