Track-by-Track: From Please to Nonetheless

[Disco.]

Bilingual is a great album, anyone saying anything else are wrong

[tottenhammattspurs]

Bilingual is two tracks too long. Trouble is, no one can agree which two.

[Disco.]

Bilingual is two tracks too long. Trouble is, no one can agree which two.

Yeah, and Neil and Chris are also saying it’s too long, they think that Electricity and Metamorphosis should have been removed from the album ( Bilingual Further Listening liner notes)

[TwizzleUK]

I've always loved these lyrics from Discoteca - some of Neil's finest:

I don’t speak in anger
though the chances that I’ve let
pass me by and now regret
I can’t forget
They’re haunting me
like a score of unpaid debts

[Disco.]

He is just a fantastic lyricist isn’t he ? A generational talent as we say in F1{F1 fan)

[markus]

Bilingual is two tracks too long. Trouble is, no one can agree which two.

Yeah, and Neil and Chris are also saying it’s too long, they think that Electricity and Metamorphosis should have been removed from the album ( Bilingual Further Listening liner notes)

They’re wrong. Just like Very sounds like a brick of orange Lego, Bilingual’s first half sounds like a yellow, sunny spring morning. NY house and trip-hop were still new, 1996 was a good year for music, and the world was in a good place. All those songs needed to be there.

[Disco.]

It’s just a matter of opinion isn’t it ?,

[markus]

It’s just a matter of opinion isn’t it ?,

Yup. But, Bilingual's one of the few albums I play from start to finish without skipping or changing the order.

[NOBODY75]

I didn't know they'd said they should have removed "Metamorphosis" and "Electricity" from the album.
I completely agree about "Electricity." The "Metamorphosis" thing leaves me astonished.

[NotInvisible]

What have PSB really sold beyond the same loyal fanbase that stayed after their imperial phase?

Singles and records. You're vastly overestimating how many people buy Annually.

Compare the streams for Nonetheless with the millions listening to Röyksopp or Daft Punk just because they like electronic dance music.

Different audiences for different types of music. Royksopp means next to nothing in the pop world, and Pet Shop Boys are a pop band.

But I’m convinced they more or less chose to give up their imperial phase without a fight.

Tastes were changing, it was inevitable. It's why no one has ever had a career-long imperial phase.

They could have been the poster boys for their niche within the dance scene in the 2000s, just as they were for Italo disco and synth-pop in the ’80s.

They were never the poster boys for Italo disco, and by the 2000s their remixes weren't exactly setting clubs on fire.

[NotInvisible]

Yeah, and Neil and Chris are also saying it’s too long, they think that Electricity and Metamorphosis should have been removed from the album ( Bilingual Further Listening liner notes)

Bilingual is a terrific album if you swap half of it out with some of the era's b-sides. But they didn't fully commit to the premise, so it's a bit of a curate's egg. I'd actually remove A Red Letter Day and Saturday Night Forever before Electricity and Metamorphosis, but they could probably all four go. And then throw in Hit or Miss, Betrayed and The Calm Before the Storm to replace them.

[Lleonard Pler]

Discoteca
Single
Se a vida é
It always comes as a surprise
A red letter day
Up against it
The survivors
How I learned to hate rock'n'roll
To step aside
The boy who couldn't keep his clothes on

Perfection.

[NOBODY75]

I never understood why they didn't include "The Boy Who" when its sound fits perfectly with the Latin rhythms of other songs on the album. "Hit and Miss" is surely the opposite, and its sound doesn't fit the album, but for me, it's a contender for best song of the Bilingual era.

[markus]

Different audiences for different types of music.

Nope. PSB fans fell in love with a synth-pop / dance act. Electronic, dance and synth-pop largely appeal to the same crowd. This wasn’t a pop audience later tolerating electronics — it was the core identity.

Pet Shop Boys are a pop band.

Not in the original sense anymore. Nonetheless probably has a few hundred thousand listeners; Röyksopp sit closer to a couple of million. That’s not age, it’s positioning. PSB albums could have reached that wider electronic audience.

Tastes were changing, it was inevitable.

It’s not “tastes” that change — it’s generations. Every decade brings a new audience that wants its own culture. To survive 40 years, you have to engage with the present, not retreat from it.
And PSB have likely never consulted anyone beyond management and record-company people — the very people whose job is to chase the next big thing, not to help a legacy act evolve intelligently.

They were never poster boys for Italo disco / club culture.

They were part of that continuum in the ’80s, and Relentless proves they could still make serious dance music whenever they wanted. That makes this a matter of choice, not ability.

Their remixes weren’t setting clubs on fire.

Agreed — Long history of choosing weak remixes.

[richwill]

Although the same is true of the far more consistent Very - in fact, all their early albums -, I do think that any album with multiple producers is likely to lack coherence. From Bilingual through to Fundamental, there's a real messiness wrt which tracks were chosen and in which order. Tracks like Email, Electricity and The Only One are clearly substandard, which is weird when they had far better songs to offer. Working with a single producer from Yes onwards has benefitted them greatly, although iyam Elysium is a dog's dinner, just a jumble of fairly random material they had lying around. Maybe with their earlier albums it was the record company that gave it some shape. Left to their own devices, they don't really seem to understand what an album is. It's worth watching the Limmy video from the other day about the production of West End Girls, it's obviously about a single rather than an album but it does highlight the fact that without some proper help they're sometimes a bit hapless. Maybe the lesson is that after a first flush of inspiration it takes a shitton of resources to guarantee a really, really good album. Hence Nonetheless, properly backed by Parlophone, being much more consistent than the previous ones.