Review in Dallas Morning News
http://www.guidelive.com/sharedcontent/ ... 77fb3.html
Pop: The bite is back
POP REVIEW: Pet Shop Boys deliver excellent, no-frills
12:25 PM CDT on Monday, October 23, 2006
By MARIO TARRADELL / The Dallas Morning News
GRAND PRAIRIE – England's Pet Shop Boys wrings juice out of theatrical minimalism, which in their hands isn't an oxymoron. Onstage Sunday night at Nokia Theatre the duo of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe put on a fantastic show sans band and ornate décor.
[Click image for a larger version] JASON JANIK/Special Contributor
JASON JANIK/Special Contributor
Neil Tennant's vocals were strong throughout the Pet Shop Boys' performance Sunday at Nokia Theatre in Grand Prairie.
The pair used movable, cloth-covered panels that projected video images, a few props, three background vocalists and two dancers. Mr. Lowe stood behind his synthesizer bank, just a laptop computer perched on keyboards. Mr. Tennant worked the platform in his usually subdued way. Even when he claps it's with such dainty British reserve.
But at every moment, he was passionately engaged in the production. His vocals were strong throughout, and you could tell he relished the opportunity to deliver 20 years of material in such a pointed yet plaintive way.
The gig, in support of the fabulous new CD, Fundamental, was a vast improvement over the Release tour four years ago at the now-defunct Bronco Bowl. On that trek, the Boys were trying to be live musicians, bringing with them a full band and inexplicably hiding behind obscured lights. That performance zapped all of the bite from their repertoire.
Glad they came to their senses. The Pet Shop Boys should be enjoyed in all their synthesized, dramatic, visual and intelligent glory. We got that in spades. There wasn't a dud during the hour and 45 minute set before 1,753 enthusiastic fans.
When sounds mingled with sights, the duo revved into high gear. "Rent" found Mr. Tennant sitting behind a panel, his silhouetted figure profile to the audience. On a top panel, a dancer moved behind the fabric. That was it. How striking, especially since Mr. Tennant sang with such inspired clarity.
"I'm With Stupid," the insanely catchy dance track from Fundamental, featured visuals of U.S. and British flags, then the faces of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The tune's a sarcastic, biting number painting Bush and Blair as dumb lovers.
"Dreaming of the Queen" was stunning, thanks to video footage of a funeral procession to underscore the topic of the song, the death toll of AIDS on gay men. "Numb" showed bleak, black-and-white pictures of war-torn poverty to pronounce the drained emotionalism of the song's lyrics.
Sticking with the war theme, "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show" combined footage of warplanes with a sort of military flamboyance, if you will. Mr. Tennant, his dancers and background vocalists were dressed in uniforms inordinately filled with shiny medals. At one point the dancers marched with rifles topped by flowers.
With the Pet Shop Boys, the details speak volumes.
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Review in Fort-Worth Star-Telegram
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/entertainment/15835177.htm
Pet Shop Boys can still put on a great show
By CARY DARLING
STAR-TELEGRAM POP CULTURE CRITIC
Neil Tennant, left, and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys brought style and humor to their show at Nokia Theatre.
GETTY IMAGES/MJ KIM
Neil Tennant, left, and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys brought style and humor to their show at Nokia Theatre.
Even if you don't like the Pet Shop Boys, you have to respect them.
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have been making smart, artful electronic pop together for two decades, weathering the whims of changing musical fashion and resisting the easy lure of becoming a nostalgia act despite their lack of chart success in recent years. They proved this once again Sunday night at the Nokia Theatre at Grand Prairie in a theatrical two-hour set that spanned their two-decade career with a sense of style and humor.
When the droll Tennant welcomed the crowd to "an evening of electronic entertainment, because that's what we do," it seemed equal parts charming hello and a statement of muted rage against the hip-hop/emo/post-grunge/Nickelback machine that keeps the likes of the Pet Shop Boys locked out of radio. As if to prove their creative wellsprings have not run dry, they performed much of the material from their new, flawed CD Fundamental -- perhaps too much, as it came at the expense of some older classics.
The set was divided in two parts, separated by a 20-minute intermission. In the first act, the top-hatted Tennant and always-mute keyboardist Lowe seemed a bit removed. It was not until nearly the break, when they launched into their 1985 hit, Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money), that the crowd started to seem engaged. The second part felt looser, with Tennant even sitting down with an acoustic guitar for the song Home and Dry.
Assisted by two loose-limbed dancers and three singers (including house-music diva Sylvia Mason-James), Tennant and Lowe played the show against an eye-popping, ever-changing backdrop of large, opaque interlocking cubes. At times, someone might be standing inside a cube, or the cubes were joined to form a giant video screen (upon which footage of Princess Diana's funeral was projected during the haunting anti-AIDS ballad Dreaming of the Queen). It was a simple concept that worked well.
The show had its whimsically campy moments -- the dancers playing up gay-cowboy chic during the Boys' take on U2's earnest slice of Americana, Where the Streets Have No Name, or the night's rousingly anthemic version of the Village People's Go West. So it was easy to understand the cheers that greeted Tennant when, after a sweeping version of It's a Sin, he proudly proclaimed, "We are still the Pet Shop Boys."
Yes, they are.
GRADE: A-
Pet Shop Boys
Nokia Theatre at Grand Prairie
Sunday night
