Pet Shop Boys
Parlophone
This, their 10th album, following 2006’s reflective Fundamental, occupies a similar space to 1993’s upbeat Very, which followed their downbeat career-highlight, 1990’s Behaviour.
It opens with the barnstorming single, Love, Etc. a bonafied hit, which reveals new subtleties with each listen. After faltering on ‘All Around The World’, which never quite gels, the 60’s pastiche ‘Beautiful People’, with lush strings (Owen Pallet – Last Shadow Puppets) and harmonica (Johnny Marr) sails on a verse as sweet as anything they’ve done. Marr returns with a Smiths-guitar hook on ‘Did You See Me Coming?’ which competes with Isaac Hayes’ ‘Hold on, I’m Comin’ in the double entendre stakes, and is a summery pop song, sounding like it took 5 minutes to write – like all good pop songs should.
The gentle, Spanish guitar-led ‘Vulnerable’ harks back to the Behaviour-era; sounding like an outtake from their Liza Minnelli album sessions, albeit with contemporary, electronica flourishes. It is on these quieter (and increasingly more typical) PSB moments, such as ‘King of Rome’, that the album most shines. Nevertheless, the highlight (other than the occasional Chris Lowe vocal), is ‘The Way It Used To Be’, seizing the baton from ‘Being Boring’, an elegiac piece demanding repeat the moment it’s finished.
Perhaps most impressively, this album captures the healthy hooks of Xenomania contemporary chart pop, thus its times perfectly, and building on the ‘return to form’ established on Fundamental, places them back where they should be, at the very heart of British pop music, if not the charts. Tom Hocknell
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