The singer once cruelly mocked as a "the singing budgie" has appropriately harnessed the medium of Twitter to reveal that she's back in the studio recording a follow-up to 2007's X.

Judging solely by the amount of exclamation marks involved it's fair to assume that Kylie is quite excited by the progress so far. Let's see if they're appropriate...

“OK!!! It's official...My producer in the studio this week has been....the amazing Stuart Price!!!! Having fun and making magic :)”.

Kylie is allowed to use those exclamation marks because this is usually the most exciting part of her album campaign. This is when her fans can still imagine her releasing the classic Kylie album, once and for all.

Notice how Kylie slips "this week" into that message though. If the process is anything like on X, Team Minogue will be getting into bed with all manner of writer/producers after calling in around a million demo tracks. From those they must choose an album's worth of the safest songs about Kylie going dancing, Kylie feeling sexy, Kylie dancing while feeling a bit sexy, and so on.

When they finally have an album's worth of material about anything other than the real Kylie (she's a great pop cypher after all) they can, if it's anything like X, get down to the tricky business of picking the wrong lead single and never releasing the best one.

There was a time when Kylie working with Stuart "Hung Up" Price would have been a thrilling idea - circa Les Rhythmes Digitales ideally. Now it just seems unimaginative, as if she's just going through the loco-motions. Oh, he did "Hung Up", that'll be good. Erm, where did I put that r&b-lite number?

Rather conveniently (you'd think), 2009 was the year of disco's comeback. But no, let's ignore this perfect alignment of the stars and hook her up with MOR British r&b man Taio Cruz, Girls Aloud producers Xenomania, and Madonna's sloppy seconds Stuart Price. Why don't they just invite saboteur stylist William Baker back and put her in feathers again if they're so determined to step back in time?

Still, as Kylie herself put it, Stuart Price is in "this week". Next week it could very well be Aeroplane, Todd Terje, Prins Thomas, anyone from DFA, or Lindstrom.

But I doubt it. Sigh.