Last year Kylie Minogue published a children’s book based on her life. On page 3 of The Showgirl Princess, we see Kylie sinking into her jasmine-scented bath, pondering the team of helpers who “had helped to make her dreams come true”. Turning to her dog Sheeba, Kylie exclaims: “I’m so lucky people care about me so much.”

Read The Showgirl Princess to your kids enough times and you begin to accept those words as unquestioningly as her docile mutt does. People do care about Kylie, but quite how lucky that makes her is another matter. Listening to X, it occurs to you that being a pop icon must, at times, be like being the England team. Everyone has an opinion about what best to do with it, from postironic Hoxtonites to the loyal G.A.Y. contingent.

And then there are the songwriters. Guy Chambers, Cathy Dennis, Christian Karlsson, etc, wander from one studio to another, somehow seeking to capture the essence of this week’s star in a song. The songwriters rarely do a terrible job, and on X there are serviceable confections such as Wow, the marauding glam of the new single 2 Hearts and the Serge Gainsbourg-sampling Sensitised.

But, in this impeccable parade of pop chops, seven songs elapse before any level of emotional engagement is demanded of you. Written as she recovered from her breast cancer treatment, a summery acoustic thing called No More Rain is like a wood-panelled Morris Minor next to such state-of-the-art creations as NuDiTy and All I See. And yet that’s the first song you feel like listening to again.

Not so Speakerphone, which dares you to keep a straight face as Kylie’s heavily treated voice implores you to “drop your socks and grab your mini boom-box”. After a minute you’re already looking for Chris Morris’s name on the album credits. How disappointing then to discover that Karlsson – the genius behind much of Britney Spears’s recent Blackout – deems Kylie worthy of such ultra-stylised dreck.

He’s by no means the only culprit. Those people who would have you believe that her best moment was her cameo on DJ Towa Tei’s German Bold Italic – the one in which she pretended to be a font – will hail the Calvin Harris-assisted Heart Beat Rock as “bold”. But Kylie has strengths! And no matter what we disagree about, surely all sensible beings agree that impassively enunciating lyrics such as “Ladies in the spotlight/ Boys are checking out their tights” isn’t one of them.

Maybe it’ll be a different story if she takes these songs on to the road. Just as Gwen Stefani, in her recent shows, throttled some of her much-needed self into songs from The Sweet Escape, there’s every reason to believe that Kylie can humanise this strangely uncompelling album. Let’s hope so, because from this vantage point, you can barely sense her presence.

(Parlophone)

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