The Observer 5/5 Peter Robinson (aka Mr Popjustice)
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/10be ... 58,00.html
Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe get back to pop's first principles and produce a career-highpoint album, writes Peter Robinson
Sunday May 21, 2006
In 2003, the Pet Shop Boys' career retrospective PopArt - arguably the best British pop collection of the past 30 years - limped its way to No 30 in the charts. It was an uncomfortable sight following the previous year's Release, a foray into non-electronica for which the term 'lukewarm reception' might have been invented. Would anybody care if the Pet Shop Boys never released another album?
Madonna responded to a similar crisis following American Life by turning in 'Hung Up', and early reports of this new Pet Shop Boys album - with terms like '"It's a Sin"-style disco stompers' being bandied around - suggested that Tennant and Lowe had also decided it was time to go once again for the pop jugular. While nothing on Fundamental is quite so furiously commercial as Madge's most recent signature hit, this album is still a dazzler. It reunites the duo with Trevor Horn and sees a return to the band's core values, set, on many of the best tracks, to a disco beat. This is true of the album's lead single 'I'm With Stupid' - bright, funny, sad and opinionated. The topic of ID cards is covered on 'Integral' ('If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear/ If you've something to hide you shouldn't even be here') - both political and angry, and also the album's most furious disco stomper. From the titles alone, 'The Sodom & Gomorrah Show' and 'Casanova In Hell' are PSB classics, and that's before you get to the sumptuously produced, wonderfully crafted music. The inclusion of a Diane Warren-penned Aerosmith reject 'Numb' (originally recorded two years ago) is something of a curiosity, but there is ample compensation in other moments, such as the New Order-esque final minute of 'Minimal'.
It would have been one of pop's supreme ironies if the Pet Shop Boys ended up in the 'dumper' that Tennant and his Smash Hits colleagues invented in the 1980s; as it is, this comeback from a band who never really went away is the Pet Shop Boys' best album in over a decade, sitting neatly between their previous career highpoints of Very and Behaviour, and it propels them back into the pop premier league.
Download: 'I'm With Stupid'; 'Integral'; 'Casanova in Hell'
UK Press reviews
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joncool5
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Janet Street-Porter
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The review in The Observer itself is rather less complimentary.Dipso wrote:The Observer 5/5 Peter Robinson (aka Mr Popjustice)
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/10be ... 58,00.html
Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe get back to pop's first principles and produce a career-highpoint album, writes Peter Robinson
Sunday May 21, 2006
In 2003, the Pet Shop Boys' career retrospective PopArt - arguably the best British pop collection of the past 30 years - limped its way to No 30 in the charts. It was an uncomfortable sight following the previous year's Release, a foray into non-electronica for which the term 'lukewarm reception' might have been invented. Would anybody care if the Pet Shop Boys never released another album?
Madonna responded to a similar crisis following American Life by turning in 'Hung Up', and early reports of this new Pet Shop Boys album - with terms like '"It's a Sin"-style disco stompers' being bandied around - suggested that Tennant and Lowe had also decided it was time to go once again for the pop jugular. While nothing on Fundamental is quite so furiously commercial as Madge's most recent signature hit, this album is still a dazzler. It reunites the duo with Trevor Horn and sees a return to the band's core values, set, on many of the best tracks, to a disco beat. This is true of the album's lead single 'I'm With Stupid' - bright, funny, sad and opinionated. The topic of ID cards is covered on 'Integral' ('If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear/ If you've something to hide you shouldn't even be here') - both political and angry, and also the album's most furious disco stomper. From the titles alone, 'The Sodom & Gomorrah Show' and 'Casanova In Hell' are PSB classics, and that's before you get to the sumptuously produced, wonderfully crafted music. The inclusion of a Diane Warren-penned Aerosmith reject 'Numb' (originally recorded two years ago) is something of a curiosity, but there is ample compensation in other moments, such as the New Order-esque final minute of 'Minimal'.
It would have been one of pop's supreme ironies if the Pet Shop Boys ended up in the 'dumper' that Tennant and his Smash Hits colleagues invented in the 1980s; as it is, this comeback from a band who never really went away is the Pet Shop Boys' best album in over a decade, sitting neatly between their previous career highpoints of Very and Behaviour, and it propels them back into the pop premier league.
Download: 'I'm With Stupid'; 'Integral'; 'Casanova in Hell'
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Janet Street-Porter
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!
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- Joined: Mon 23 Jan 2006, 7:13 pm
There's a review in The Mail on Sunday (I only got it for the X-Men cards 
)
Pet hates we all still love
The new album by the Pet Shop Boys culminates in a song about identity, which is just as it should be. Few acts in pop history have had a clearer sense of self than Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. You can spot their records just by the cover designs, which are elegantly minimal, like a 4in loft.
You can also spot them by their titles, which are long and conversational for single songs (classic example: You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk) or short and to the point for albums - Please, Actually, Very and Introspective have now been joined by Fundamental.
And of course you can spot them by their sound: pensive, pumping electro-pop, featuring fat synths and a thin but distinctive voice.
Better at making singles than albums, they have nonetheless proved the most durable of duos. It's now 21 years since they broke through with West End Girls. Pop eras and Prime Ministers have come and gone, but the Pet Shop Boys go on and on.
They have had a sideline in social comment ever since Thatcherism, with songs like Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money), and this is the mode that dominates Fundamental, produced by Mr. Eighties himself, Trevor Horn.
With Thatcher the boys were aghast; with Tony Blair they are disappointed, because Tennant was a New Labour donor who went to the victory party on Election night in 1997, when things could only get better.
Disappointment is a particular Pet Shop Boys emotion, so the protest songs feel natural. The storming finale, Integral, lampoons the case for identity cards and broadens into an attack on authoritarianism. Twentieth Century is the most thoughtful of Iraq war songs, a reflection on the mess from the view point of one who supported the invasion.
Indefinite Leave to Remain, a title no other band in the world could have dreamt up, can be read either as a plea from an asylum seeker or as a proposal of civil partnership. The political and the personal are entwined, which stops the songs being shrill or dry.
The one broadside that doesn't work is the current single, I'm With Stupid. The lyrics are strong - skewing Blair's relationship with George W. Bush by treating it as a sad infatuation - but the chorus is fatally weak. As the verses build, you're expecting a chant, and all you get is a high pitched mutter.
A couple of other tracks misfire. Numb, written by the Los Angeles power-ballad manufacturer Diane Warren, is just awful, a brain-dead Robbie Williams album track showing that even the Pet Shop Boys can lose their identity.
A song of their own called Minimal is not much better: the rhymes are ostentatious (criminal, subliminal) and the synths are secondhand, leaving you feeling that it's time for a five-year ban on homages to Kraftwerk.
But when this album is good, it is outstanding. Two songs rise above politics to comment on the state of our minds: Luna Park is a sweeping ballad about dumb consumerism ('on ths shooting range/the plastic prizes never change'), while The Sodom and Gomorrah Show is a pulsating cornucopia of sound that uses every trick in Horn's book to tackle celebrity culture.
It's like watching an episode of Grumpy Old Men that isn't depressing.
The slow songs have a touching dignity. Indefinite Leave to Remain, stagey but likeable, has a gorgeous brass part. I Made My Excuses and Left, about being cuckolded, is an exquisite expression of embarrassement that takes Tennant into Alan Bennett territory. Almost as a bonus, there's a bodice-ripping number, Casanova In Hell, which contains possibly the sauciest-ever use of a Cello.
Next time the Pet Shop Boys do one of their excellent compilations, half of these songs will demand a place.
* * * * (4 out of 5)
) Pet hates we all still love
The new album by the Pet Shop Boys culminates in a song about identity, which is just as it should be. Few acts in pop history have had a clearer sense of self than Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. You can spot their records just by the cover designs, which are elegantly minimal, like a 4in loft.
You can also spot them by their titles, which are long and conversational for single songs (classic example: You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk) or short and to the point for albums - Please, Actually, Very and Introspective have now been joined by Fundamental.
And of course you can spot them by their sound: pensive, pumping electro-pop, featuring fat synths and a thin but distinctive voice.
Better at making singles than albums, they have nonetheless proved the most durable of duos. It's now 21 years since they broke through with West End Girls. Pop eras and Prime Ministers have come and gone, but the Pet Shop Boys go on and on.
They have had a sideline in social comment ever since Thatcherism, with songs like Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money), and this is the mode that dominates Fundamental, produced by Mr. Eighties himself, Trevor Horn.
With Thatcher the boys were aghast; with Tony Blair they are disappointed, because Tennant was a New Labour donor who went to the victory party on Election night in 1997, when things could only get better.
Disappointment is a particular Pet Shop Boys emotion, so the protest songs feel natural. The storming finale, Integral, lampoons the case for identity cards and broadens into an attack on authoritarianism. Twentieth Century is the most thoughtful of Iraq war songs, a reflection on the mess from the view point of one who supported the invasion.
Indefinite Leave to Remain, a title no other band in the world could have dreamt up, can be read either as a plea from an asylum seeker or as a proposal of civil partnership. The political and the personal are entwined, which stops the songs being shrill or dry.
The one broadside that doesn't work is the current single, I'm With Stupid. The lyrics are strong - skewing Blair's relationship with George W. Bush by treating it as a sad infatuation - but the chorus is fatally weak. As the verses build, you're expecting a chant, and all you get is a high pitched mutter.
A couple of other tracks misfire. Numb, written by the Los Angeles power-ballad manufacturer Diane Warren, is just awful, a brain-dead Robbie Williams album track showing that even the Pet Shop Boys can lose their identity.
A song of their own called Minimal is not much better: the rhymes are ostentatious (criminal, subliminal) and the synths are secondhand, leaving you feeling that it's time for a five-year ban on homages to Kraftwerk.
But when this album is good, it is outstanding. Two songs rise above politics to comment on the state of our minds: Luna Park is a sweeping ballad about dumb consumerism ('on ths shooting range/the plastic prizes never change'), while The Sodom and Gomorrah Show is a pulsating cornucopia of sound that uses every trick in Horn's book to tackle celebrity culture.
It's like watching an episode of Grumpy Old Men that isn't depressing.
The slow songs have a touching dignity. Indefinite Leave to Remain, stagey but likeable, has a gorgeous brass part. I Made My Excuses and Left, about being cuckolded, is an exquisite expression of embarrassement that takes Tennant into Alan Bennett territory. Almost as a bonus, there's a bodice-ripping number, Casanova In Hell, which contains possibly the sauciest-ever use of a Cello.
Next time the Pet Shop Boys do one of their excellent compilations, half of these songs will demand a place.
* * * * (4 out of 5)
Last edited by ! on Sun 21 May 2006, 8:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Another glowing review from today's Metro (London's free daily paper). Sorry I can't find an online link so I've quoted below:
"Pet Shop Buoyant
Two decades in pop seems a paradox but Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe make it an art form. Ninth studio album Fundamental is a meeting of minds with veteran Trevor Horn (who produced 1998 hit Left to My Own Devices) and the Pet Shop Boys' most confident to date: a sublime collection of show-stoppers, hi-NRG, dancefloor stormers, slow burners, political themes and pure hedonism.
They haven't lost their knack for catchy tunes or turns of phrase, as proved by I'm With Stupid (about the Blair-Bush affair) or the arch romance of Casanova In Hell. A resonant treat."
5 stars out of 5
"Pet Shop Buoyant
Two decades in pop seems a paradox but Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe make it an art form. Ninth studio album Fundamental is a meeting of minds with veteran Trevor Horn (who produced 1998 hit Left to My Own Devices) and the Pet Shop Boys' most confident to date: a sublime collection of show-stoppers, hi-NRG, dancefloor stormers, slow burners, political themes and pure hedonism.
They haven't lost their knack for catchy tunes or turns of phrase, as proved by I'm With Stupid (about the Blair-Bush affair) or the arch romance of Casanova In Hell. A resonant treat."
5 stars out of 5
you could say conventional ... and I could claim intentional
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Janet Street-Porter
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http://www.megastar.co.uk/essentialmusi ... M5Njc.html
classic era middle-class electro
Are PSB inherently middle-class? I don't think so. Didn't Erasure say that PSB were middle-class while Andy and his frocks were down with Joe Prole?
classic era middle-class electro
Are PSB inherently middle-class? I don't think so. Didn't Erasure say that PSB were middle-class while Andy and his frocks were down with Joe Prole?