- Label
- Parlophone
- Release date
- 23rd March 2009
- Genre
- Pop
- Buy this album
- Order CD
It’s been 25 years since West End Girls, you know
Reliably, the Pet Shop Boys are never less than sharp, urbane and sophisticated. Neil Tennant’s bon mots hit the spot with a sniper’s precision: Chris Lowe’s slick techno-rhythms glide with immaculate élan.
Yes, their tenth studio album, runs its eyes over today’s cultural mores, from Captain Britain to the Carphone Warehouse, with its usual arch knowingness – yet it is not clear just who is still listening nowadays.
Yes is a good Pet Shop Boys album, but not a great one. Love Etc ropes in their soul mates du jour Xenomania and Building A Wall co-opts Johnny Marr as it mourns a sepia Britain long past but there is no deliciously insidious, magnificently melodic West End Girls or Suburbia here.
It is undoubtedly one of the sharpest – and easily the most literate – synth-pop album that will be made this year, but where Pet Shop Boys used to sound like they were setting the musical agenda, now they are merely heckling from the sidelines.
I guess age gets to the best of us.
Also to try:
New Order: Republic
Electronic: Twisted Tenderness
Fischerspooner: Odyssey
