When Neil Tennant left his job at Smash Hits to concentrate
on the Pet Shop Boys, the magazine published an obituary
announcing that the band wouldn’t last six months.
A full twenty years on, Tennant and Chris Lowe are still
very much around and truly alive. But is high energy
still relevant today? In the case of the Pet Shop Boys
it appears that, despite their last album, Release,
being mostly based around a guitar/bass/drums structure,
Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant have continuously adapted
to the ever-changing club culture, cleverly twisting
it to fit their unique pop sensibility.
Founded in the early eighties after Tennant & Lowe
bumped into each other in an electronics shop on the
Kings Road in London, the Pet Shop Boys brought a touch
of art school elitism to the effervescent dance music
scene. Alternating between studio albums, remix projects
and various collections, the band have over the years
fully exploited their image while maintaining a fine
balance between pop and dance. Almost as famous for
their extremely pertinent B-sides, used for their more
experimental songs, as for their more mainstream work,
Tennant and Lowe have proved to be one of the only enduring
acts of the eighties. Following Disco, released
barely a few months after Please, their first
album, and Disco 2, published eight years later,
this third installment contains a handful of reworked
versions of tracks lifted from Release. Unlike
the two previous Disco offerings though, this
album also features five previously unreleased dance
tracks recorded during the Release sessions.
At times evocative of the limited mini-album Relentless,
released as an add-on to Very back in 1993,
the album kicks off with Time On My Hands,
a Kraftwerk-meet-New Order electro mutant reminiscent
of the band’s Two Divided By Zero in
some ways, and features both Neil and Chris on vocal
duties.
Finding themselves at the heart of the eighties electro
revival, the Pet Shop Boys embrace once again the sound
which took them to the top of the charts, first with
the hands on Positive Role Model and dreamy
Try It, then later with If Looks Could
Kill. Cleverly mixing their high energy with the
roots of their sound, Tennant and Lowe emulate some
of the best moments of their career and demonstrate
that, despite the conformist sound of Release,
they still have the inimitable touch that has become
their trademark. Other highlights of this album include
the Thee Radikal Blaklite Edit of London and
the Superchumbo mix of Sexy Northerner, originally
the B-side of Home & Dry. The PSB extended
mix of Here is also well worth a listen, if
only because it was by far the best song on Release.
The album, surprisingly, closes on a low key with a
piano version of London, as heard on the band’s
last tour, bringing the high level of energy right down
before the band eventually walk out, almost unnoticed.
Neil Tennant has proved his old workmates very wrong,
and together with Chris Lowe, the Pet Shop Boys have
definitely shaped up part of the pop musical landscape
of the last twenty years. Despite not exactly pushing
boundaries much these days, it is through their more
demanding work, on B-sides and on projects such as this
one that the Pet Shop Boys prove to be the most relevant
of acts.
4.1/5 |
