REVIEWS:
The Pet Shop Boys are regarded as a flash-in-the-pan in the US, and.....well....that's because they are, at least on the hick side of the pond. The duo of witmaster Neil Tennant and synthesizer silent man Chris Lowe had the unfortunate fate of becoming an instant hit on both sides of the Atlantic upon debuting with a few facile dancepop hits, and when they finally began to move on to more layered, sophisticated and overall better music, the American public had already lost interest, with synth music not being the particular flavor of the month. Their loss, I guess - even though the PSBs' music has been branded "wussy fag music" by bigoted rednecks on many an occasion (GOD, I hate spelling that word), it's all still incredibly witty and well-arranged, and probably the best synthpop I've ever heard (which, despite my alleged addiction to '80s music, has never been one of my favorite genres no matter what that dirty commie George Starostin might tell you). The beats are groovin', the lyrics are prissy and funny (Neil Tennant is openly gay, and Chris Lowe doesn't exactly seem like the most masculine dude in Great Britain either), what more could you want? Guitars? Oh, come on, we've moved past that bygone era. This is the future of music!!! Elitist.
--Rich Bunnell
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
So anyway, after justifying how much I like this wussy synth stuff in the opening paragraph, I suddenly find myself having to come to terms with the fact that....well....the Boys weren't that good when they first started out. I mean, they were okay and all, but the music on this particular album just strikes me as that of your average '80s Everyfrigginband, electronic drums, synths, yeah I know that this stuff would continue to be a part of their sound in the '90s, but they weren't very skilled at it at this point. This is really just a bunch of cold hard dance grooves with Neil Tennant reciting lyrics related to the hardships of inner city life which he didn't actually experience since he had a geeky desk job as a music critic (not that I should talk) and also how love comes quickly and in spite of all this he still wants a lover later tonight, presumably male. Often he speaks the lyrics instead of singing them, and with a singing voice like that you'd think it wouldn't be a problem, but it gives the music a cold robotic edge which gets annoying pretty quickly.
There's some great, yummy dance music on the first side, particularly the hits "West End Girls" and "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)" which continue to be played endlessly on '80s flashback radio to this very day, and were I not sick to death of both of them I'd probably be listening to them right now. The album opens with a nifty mechanical groove called "Two Divided By Zero" with a Speak 'N' Math endlessly repeating the title (I used to have one of those things!!); it's less stupid than it sounds. The most solid song melodically is the rolling ballad "Love Comes Quickly," which I'd respect a lot more if it didn't have that spoken word intro or didn't rip off its vocal hook from Depeche Mode's "People Are People" so blatantly. The rest of the album is far less enjoyable to these ears, less hard-edged and more light and frothy. "Suburbia" would be heavily improved in its single mix, ballads like "Violence" and "Later Tonight" float by without notice, and as bubbly-poppy as the song is, I really don't want to hear Neil Tennant doing Madonna-style dance music like "Why Don't We Live Together?". The album is decent for the '80s afficionado, but pretty disposable by the Boys' prissy standards, and you can get most of the good songs on Discography, so go buy that, holmes.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
To these ears, it sounds to me like the Boys upped the "frothy pop" quotient of the debut and decided to run with it - gone are the really cold-sounding synthesizers, "West End Girls" and all that, with a heavier emphasis on melody and actual songwriting dynamics, always a step in the rig ht direction. I still don't enjoy this album any more than the previous one, mainly because even though the added sense of melody made them churn out better songs than they did before, the bad songs are just lame. "We're S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G, we're shopping!" Um....thanks for telling me that, Neil. I also never knew that there was "hit music on the radio, in stereo," but I'm glad that they felt the need to tell me that over a generic synth beat. They named a self-produced movie after the dreary ballad "It Couldn't Happen Here," and I've heard that it's a pile of unwatchable pretentious crap with no plot, and with a dull title track like that I'm not inclined to watch it.
Most of the rest is top-notch pop music, sometimes a bit cheesy for my tastes but still goes down easily and that's fine with me. They duet with soulster Dusty Springfield on "What Have I Done To Deserve This," probably the corniest song the Boys ever wrote, but at least it has a catchy synth-horn riff and bubbles along without offending too much. The hard-hitting first single "It's A Sin" is too cool for words, even going so far as to sample a launch countdown in its intro for no reason, and "Rent" is a tender ballad unrelated to the musical in question where Neil downgrades the importance of his lover (again, presumably male) to the guy who pays his rent. I still have some gripes with some of the other tracks - the opener "One More Chance" sounds more like an empty blueprint for a really cool synthpopper than an actual song, and "Heart" is another Madonna-esque beat-frenzy (the band actually considered submitting it to her) but is another tune that would be fleshed out heavily in its superior single mix. Like the debut, the album is awfully inconsistent, but probably a little more worth buying because of the cover photo of Neil yawning. Great stuff.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I've seen this collection touted as a "remix album," but it consists completely of new material, so I'm guessing that it's actually an honest-to-god PSB studio album, as much as I wish it weren't. This is basically an album of great singles stretched like some kind of overproduced taffy into eight-minute dance grooves (6 songs in 48 minutes, do the math), and most of the songs grow extremely grating and tiresome even though behind all of the chaff most of them are really good songs. "Domino Dancing" is a neat Cuban-flavored tune and a fine single, but it really irks my ears after its fifth minute or so, especially after the Boys start piling loads of overproduced late-'80s sound effects into the mix. The covers of "It's Alright" and Elvis' "Always On My Mind" are fantastic, but it's hard to tell in the bare-bones, pointlessly-skeletonized mixes in which they're presented here as opposed to their infinitely superior single mixes, which sound like actual songs. The only two tunes that escape relatively unscathed are the two non-singles "I Want A Dog" and "I'm Not Scared," but I'm sure that if they were released as singles they would have been improved too. I'd give the album a better grade since it's at least listenable, but really, the presence of the band's singles collection renders this album almost completely obsolete. I'm just not too big on this remix crap.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
WHAT THE.....okay.....After a half-decade of just barely escaping mediocrity (whether hovering above the line or below it, like on Introspective), Neil and Chris suddenly pulled their heads out of their collective British ass and released this album, which I won't call a "masterpiece" since it's not on the level of an Abbey Road or a Dark Side Of The Moon or a Come On Over, but it's undoubtedly a huge leap forward from anything the Boys had previously done and a classic of the synthpop genre, so shove that generalization in your pipe and smoke it, mister. The songs are actually textured, carefully layered, well-constructed, well-written, soft, delicate, fluffy but in a nice way - you would never have guessed when Neil was chanting "I've got the brains, you've got the looks, let's make lots of money!" four years earlier that he would be capable of crafting an album of this much depth. I guess the "depth" is more "superficial depth," i.e. "heartfelt," "personal" lyrics hidden under "slow tempos" in a desperate attempt to grab critics by the throat, but hell, it worked on me.
The melodies on this album are consistently top-notch, if low key and clouded in atmosphere; most of the songs are clouded in washes of synths, but the melodies are still great and why should I penalize synth-pop for containing too many synths? Yeah, I hate that "water" stuff, it's too wet, and those murder mystery books have too much killing in them. The AIDS-oriented opener "Being Boring" is a common fan choice for the PSBs' best song, and it's very close in my mind, with a chilling intro and a softly-whispered vocal melody over a note-perfect backing; it still has some dancebeats and it sounds kind of like easy listening, but I don't give a rip. Possibly even better is the following song, "This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave," a monolithic, flowing synth landscape with a watery Johnny Marr guest guitar part, and you can kind of dance to it!...sort of. The music is still held up by the beats for about half of the album, but they're used more to texture the songs than to turn them into disco club anthems.
The rest of the album is a set of dour, finely-crafted ballads, with the exception of the incredibly out-of-place but great music industry putdown "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" and the more silently hard-hitting single "So Hard," with a cool thudding synthline. The rest is ballads, ballads, ballads, but I don't really mind when they're as pretty as they are, sincere without being snide, beautifully-crafted ("My October Symphony" manages to get by without even having much of a structure) and with just the right amount of synthesizers so they don't seem like overbearing reminders of why the '80s shouldn't have extended into the first year of the '90s ("Only The Wind" has some of those "Owner Of A Lonely Heart"/Janet Jackson "BANG!" noises, but they're used in such a surprisingly tasteful manner that it doesn't matter). The songs might not be as openly-catchy as they were before, and some fans decry this as atmosphere in the absense of melody, but you've got to hand it to any album that has a song carried entirely by Neil Tennant's voice ("Nervously") but still manages to be great.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
The greatest hits compilation, and an essential buy not only because three out of the four albums released during the period 1986-1991 were incredibly patchy, but because about half of the songs (all of the Introspective ones in particular) are in superior remixed versions that blow the originals out of the water and into some desert wasteland far from said water to rot and die. "Heart" is improved by a throbbing beat that totally fits the name of the song and stuff, "Suburbia" is given a fuller, more epic mix, and even if they sounded like pieces of repetitive annoyance on Introspective, "Domino Dancing," "Left To My Own Devices," "Always On My Mind" and "It's Alright" sound awesome in their shorter, more concise single mixes. Especially that last one - it's like a completely different song! They reprocessed the whole thing and made it good! These aren't even remixes, they're like rebirths or something.
Not only are the rebirths fantastic, the track selection isn't anything to blow your phlegm-clogged nose at either. I personally wouldn't snub any single disc that in addition to the aforementioned tracks contained "West End Girls," "Opportunities," "So Hard," "Being Boring," "Love Comes Quickly," "It's A Sin," "Rent," a couple of awesome teaser singles (the repetitive, low-key "DJ Culture" and the uptempo swirling disco "Was It Worth It?") and the Boys' campy non-album cover of U2's "Where The Streets Have No Name" which manages to flow into a rendition of Frankie Valli's "I Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" after each chorus without sounding forced or lame. That was one sentence. This collection is too good for periods. Buy it, even if you have all of the Boys' other albums, it's so essential that each CD collection should have an open shrine reserved for it. It doesn't include "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" but I never liked the single mix of that song anyway, so the perfection of this disc is not tainted whatsoever.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
The slow, personal Behavior was a dropoff in sales not only in America but also in the UK, so for the followup Neil and Chris decided to rope in all of the stupid sheep by releasing an album with lots of really fast songs and shiny orange-and-blue cover art. Have you seen the music videos released from this album? They're friggin' crazy! The commercial ploy worked, and the album topped the charts in the UK and hit the surprising position of #20 in the US (probably due to a lot of singles that didn't make a splash in the Hot 100 but were successful on the dance charts). So what's my take on the album, Mr. Obsessed With Commercial Success And Chart Positions, you ask? I love it. It's catchy as hell. It might be the most intentionally commercial music that the Boys have ever pumped out, but they're a pop group anyway, so why should I give a frig that they're not filling their music with odd time signatures and distorted guitars and crap?
The singles from this album are just magnifique, if I may use one of those French words that gets used all the time by clueless non-French-speaking Americans like myself. "Can You Forgive Her" is a strong contender for their best song ever, a hard-hitting put-down strengthened by an energetic whoosh-bang delivery and a fantastic intro, and "Yesterday, When I Was Mad," an out-of-control techno-fest that sounds like it's about the critics' perception of the Boys, isn't incredibly far behind. "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing" bounces along to a pulsing beat and a piano with giddy lyrics about gettin' nekkid, and the ballad "Liberation" doesn't really sound much like a ballad at all, but I already typed that word and I ain't goin' back, suffice it to say it's a fantastic little mid-tempo tune. The most famous single is a cover of the Village People's "Go West" that surprisingly doesn't suck thanks to a hilariously straight (pun not intended) delivery by Neil and a modernized arrangement that lacks all of the disco elements from the original song.
The rest is a trifle weaker (the single choices from this album were incredibly on-the-dot) but it still has some fantastic highlights in the manic "Different Point Of View," the minimalistic, bip-boppy "One And One Make Five" and "The Theatre," with a preachy message that gets steamrollered over by a killer melody and an over-the-top arrangement that just lifts the tune into some kind of dramatic heaven (though the backing synths remind me a bit of OMD's "If You Leave," not that it matters). The only disappointing numbers are "To Speak Is A Sin," which sounds like some generic blueprint for a slow Neil Tennant ballad ala "King's Cross" from Actually, and "One In A Million," which just doesn't have a huge hook like the other songs, and dammit, on a pop album I wants my hooks and I want them huge!! Otherwise, great stuff all around, and a fantabulous starting point for any latter-day PSB collection, seeing as this is their first album not glazed over by a singles collection ala Exile On Main Street (an album which is exactly like this one in every way). Buy it, or you'll make Neil cry.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
The Boys followed Very with a huge international tour dubbed "Discovery," but it was international in the sense that it didn't once touch either Britain or the U.S. and instead concentrated on Southeastern and Latin American countries like Singapore, Australia, Chile and Brazil. Apparently the culture and music of the Latin American countries particularly struck Neil's fancy, because, as the title would suggest, this is a very multicultural album, putting elements of Latin music into the group's traditional synth-poppy sound. This was Latin pop three years before the unfortunate "Latin Explosion" ("When Third Eye Blind, Green Day and Matchbox 20 were on the charts they didn't call it a 'jackass explosion'!" -- I swear, when SNL isn't flooding the TV screen with lame recurring characters, they can come up with some funny stuff) and it's a hell of a lot more creative than any of the stuff pumped out by Ricky Martin or pre-"J. Lo" Jennifer Lopez, which is weird seeing that they're actual Latin artists and Neil and Chris are just a couple of skinny British guys. It's ironic, dontcha think.
I'm not saying that the album is a horn-filled flamenco-fest or anything - most of the Latin-inspired shizznat is relegated to the first side, with your typical PSB-pop backloaded onto the end for the loyal fans. The album gets off to a really bizarre start with "Discoteca" and "Single," two four-minute songs with nigh-identical heavy drumtracks that pretty much run entirely into one another to make an eight-minute behemoth of a tune - it's really cool and Neil and Chris hide some killer melodies underneath the atmosphere, but it really takes some getting used to. "Se A Vida E (That's The Way Life Is)" also has a heavy drumtrack, but the song actually tries to have a coherent and recognizable melody in spite of this monolithic pounding and as a result kind of bites the monkey. It's a decent song, I guess, but it sounds really soft, mushy and happy especially due to the production, which is sadly really awful for most of this album - the Boys worked with four separate producers, and the way it sounds, st least two of them should've been thrown out because there are only a few songs as cleanly-produced as anything on Very.
The rest of the album varies in quality, but tips far enough towards the "good" side of the scale to keep the album from sinking. Neil once again proudly proclaims his homosexuality with the incredibly unsubtle "Metamorphosis," which would probably be grating if not for an amazing vocal performance by Sylvia Mason-James and a really catchy rap melody that sounds like modeling music gone insane. In other news: great balladry ("It Always Comes As A Surprise"), boring balladry ("The Survivors"), catchy but lamely-produced nods to the group's club status ("Before" and "Saturday Night Forever"), and the weirdest freaking song Neil and Chris have ever written (the sample-drenched "Electricity" with the repeated chorus "It's the greatest show with the best effects since Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes"). Film at 11. The only really typical PSB numbers on the album are the rumbling and synthy "Up Against It" and "A Red Letter Day," which starts out like a self-written ripoff of the "Go West" cover (with its manly choral backing vocals) but just turns into your average (but good!) Pet Shoppers synthpopper from that point onwards. Ultimately, the album wins out in the end, even though it's wildly incoherent, and it's fitting that I wrote a similarly incoherent review for it. Hurrah for amateur criticism!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I don't really understand the promotional tactics which the Boys used for this album. It was promoted as a return to the group's club roots after the multicultural weirdosity of Bilingual, but in the promotional photos and liner notes for the album, Neil and Chris are dressed in trenchcoats and sunglasses and wearing campy brown Beethoven wigs. I dunno, maybe there was some fad in Britain that I missed out on while everyone over here in the U.S. was obsessing over Japanese fads like Pokemon and Tamagotchi. Whatever the case, this is a return to the cleanly-produced beat-heavy dancepop sound of Very, but a bit more conventional and mannered as opposed to that album's dazzling palette of color and shiny synth textures and the like.
It's a worthy addition to the group's '90s collection, but it barely misses the mark of being a modern synth classic due to several glaring flaws that I'd just love to gloss over but for the life of me I can't. One problem is that instead of coming up with anything new and interesting, Neil and Chris just fall back on the established "PSB Sound" and ride with it; "For Your Own Good Call Me Tonight" and the first single "I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore"("...expialadocious") are pretty catchy, I'd even go so far as to call them (I)really(I) catchy, but they're really repetitive and ho-hum compared to the intricate synth-pop numbers the Boys had done in the past, and the choruses grow monotonous after they're repeated for the tenth time. The genericity might be a mixed blessing, though, because when Neil tries to stretch out and do an urban-sounding rap(!) song, "Happiness Is An Option," it's nothing but a lumbering, boring mess.
On top of all that, the lyrics throughout the album are uniformly awful and lacking the flow and wit that characterized Neil's average lyrics in the past - the somewhat catchy orchestrated ballad "In Denial" has particularly atrocious lyrics about a daughter who learns that her father is gay (imagine the obviousness of "Metamorphosis" taken up a few more notches - "You're in denial, and that is final, you're not admitting you should be quitting all these queens and fairies, and Muscle Marys" - when it comes to songs about homosexuality, Neil needs a lesson in subtlety with a baseball bat), and British rent-a-diva Kylie Minogue's lifeless guest vocal doesn't help to spice matters up very much. The rest of the lyrics on the album are better (Neil's too smart to write anything like "Yeah! Yeah! Shake it shake it shake it, move it baby," so rest assured that it doesn't sink that low), but still pretty generic when stood up against "Being Boring" and other PSB lyrical classics. "Footsteps in the dark, only love can break your heart," that kind of swill.
It's pretty weird that I just spent two paragraphs complaining about an album that I basically like, though - regardless of all the numerous flaws I just named, the album is very listenable and enjoyable like all post-Introspective Pet Shop music and has a few of the group's best songs. "Closer To Heaven" is the strongest contender for "classic" status, with a wonderful Neil falsetto set to a dreamy trance-with-a-melody beat, and there are a couple of luscious little ballads in "The Only One" and "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You Drunk"(for christ's sake, Neil, this is getting ridiculous....). "Radiophonic" sways back and forth over a beat that's much less generic than it sounds, and "New York City Boy" proudly continues the Boys' camp tradition with Neil making hilarious attempts at slang ("Hear a song, that's the bomb, if you don't get the mix it's gone 86") over an irresistable disco beat and a catchy-as-a-mother chorus that manages to stay catchy no matter how many times they repeat it (a lot). So basically, it's the group's weakest album of the '90s, but it's a testament to the group's listenabity that it's still a perfectly enjoyable little album.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
The quality of the Unambiguously Gay Duo's albums had so far been on a steady decline ever since Behavior, but this is the first time the quality totally bottomed out and collapsed into flat-out mediocrity. God, what a disappointment. Even if Bilingual and Nightlife were kind of inconsistent, they were salvaged by the fact that they were fun to listen to - Neil and Chris always took whatever measures necessary to make each album as diverse and vibrant of a listen as possible even within the admittedly-narrow confines of synthpop. Sometimes the lyrics were lame, sometimes the music lapsed into the "why the hell did they write that?" category, but at least it demanded the attention of the ears. That quality is completely and totally absent on this album, about as generic and mannered of a collection of modern synthpop as I've ever heard. Over the course of ten tracks and forty-five minutes, the Boys do little more than sleepwalk their way through a set of completely mannered ballads that aim for the relaxed sound but almost entirely lack the inspired craft of anything on Behavior, with a couple of Eurodisco-Lite dance tracks thrown in that're only mildly more interesting. The album does manage to escape the recent trend of the duo's albums in that the first single "Home And Dry" is for once actually the strongest song on the album, but that isn't saying much since in spite of its smooth and breathing atmosphere, the song sounds exactly like what you'd expect from an aging synth group, based on a keyboard riff that just has to have been done a billion times already.
Apparently the Boys were going for a more guitar-based and less synth-heavy sound this time around, with Smiths axe-man Johnny Marr providing guitar backing on most of the tracks, but the casual listener won't even notice since Marr's stringed whacking stick is mostly used only to give the songs a light frothy texture that sounds, well, a hell of a lot like, uh, synths. Maybe I'm just not noticing the brilliance of this alleged "new approach" since they wasted it on overlong genericism like "Birthday Boy" or "The Night I Fell In Love"(but that one has a beat box, so I guess that means it's catchy.......cheapskates). Or maybe I'm distracted by lyrics like "Send me an E-mail that says 'I love you'"........didn't Britney Spears already cover that topic? Or better yet, Britney Cleary, extolling the pleasures of AIM to 12-year-olds the nation round. There're some okay songs......."I Get Along" and "London" are easily the best and catchiest of the album's uplifting-though-kinda-ho-hum balladry, and "The Samurai In Autumn" is featherlight, but at least upbeat and mildly engaging in a "My October Symphony" kind of way. Almost everything else, though, is just such a far cry from the Boys' usually-exciting material that I can't rank the album as anything but a massive letdown. I don't know why they suddenly felt the need to get all mature and introspective (no pun intended) especially since they already passed that test with flying colors twelve years ago. A low 5 is as high as I'm willing to go for this aptly-named collection of leaked pre-release MP3's in my hard drive.
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