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The official Pet Shop Boys thread; New album "Super"
Topic Started: Oct 30 2008, 11:59 AM (18,100 Views)
Mats
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IN THE CENTRE OF A RING JUST LIKE A CIRCUS
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I actually found Beautiful People a tad annoying :confused:

Pandemonium is gorge though :alexz:
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Riverwide
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What about the godlike "All Over The World"???
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Mats
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IN THE CENTRE OF A RING JUST LIKE A CIRCUS
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The vocals are orgasmic on that one!!
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Mats
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The dub is fucking immense!!
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Funkster
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Ok having listened to the album for the last 2 days on repeat I am deeply in love with it. It really does remind me of a cross between Very and Bilingual, which isn't a bad thing.
Loving Pandemonium at the moment.
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GimmeSomeRiver
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I think ALL OVER THE WORLD is probably going to become one of my all time PSB favorites alongside Left To My Own Devices and I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing.
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funkster
Mar 19 2009, 03:12 PM
Ok having listened to the album for the last 2 days on repeat I am deeply in love with it. It really does remind me of a cross between Very and Bilingual, which isn't a bad thing.
Loving Pandemonium at the moment.
YAY.

And yes, it really is right up there with their very best albums(Very, Behaviour)!
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GimmeSomeRiver
Mar 19 2009, 04:53 PM
I think ALL OVER THE WORLD is probably going to become one of my all time PSB favorites alongside Left To My Own Devices and I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing.
I can't stop listening to that track. :drama:
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I got my "Yes" CD today! :dance:
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News of a brand new BBC documentary about the PSB!! :alexz:

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/2009/03/bbc_says_yes_to_the_pet_shop_boys.html

BBC says Yes to the Pet Shop Boys

BBC Worldwide will celebrate over 20 years of the Pet Shop Boys with a retrospective on the band's career-defining moments on BBC shows.

Pet Shop Boys at the BBC is a 1 x 60-minute documentary made in-house, which will be sold to international territories although it is likely to be screened in the UK.

It will feature performances on BBC shows including Top of the Pops, Whistle Test and Later… with Jools Holland.

Each performance will be accompanied by exclusive new interview footage with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe filmed by BBC Worldwide Music at the Abbey Road Studios.

Its release will coincide with the release of the band's new studio album Yes, which comes out on 23 March.
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The album will be reviewed on tomorrow night's Newsnight Review on BBC2! They rarely review albums, so this is pretty cool.
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The real dark horse of this album for me has been "King Of Rome". It sounded so unremarkable at first. Now I absolutely adore it. One of the most gorgeously romantic songs they've ever recorded. :drama:
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Updated ratings:

Love etc - 8/10
All Over The World - 9/10
Beautiful People - 7/10
Did You See Me Coming - 8/10
Vulnerable - 7/10
More Than A Dream - 8/10
Building A Wall - 8/10
King Of Rome - 8/10
Pandemonium - 9/10
The Way It Used To Be - 9/10
Legacy - 7/10

And the bonus tracks:
Gin & Jag - 8/10
We're All Criminals Now - 7/10
This Used To Be The Future - 7/10
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The Stuart Price medley is on its way shortly... :dance:
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Funkster
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this thread is like a big wet dream.
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GimmeSomeRiver
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Riverwide
Mar 19 2009, 09:36 PM
The real dark horse of this album for me has been "King Of Rome". It sounded so unremarkable at first. Now I absolutely adore it. One of the most gorgeously romantic songs they've ever recorded. :drama:
TRUTH. It fits so well in the context of the album too. LUSHNESS
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GimmeSomeRiver
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Riverwide
Mar 19 2009, 11:37 PM
The Stuart Price medley is on its way shortly... :dance:
OMG :drama:
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GimmeSomeRiver
Mar 19 2009, 11:58 PM
Riverwide
Mar 19 2009, 09:36 PM
The real dark horse of this album for me has been "King Of Rome". It sounded so unremarkable at first. Now I absolutely adore it. One of the most gorgeously romantic songs they've ever recorded. :drama:
TRUTH. It fits so well in the context of the album too. LUSHNESS
Oh yes!! Good choice of word. It is indeed ultra-lush. It's not a single, but it's a perfect album track. I adore it. It's just gorrrrrgeous.

I even like "Legacy" a lot now. The lyrics are fascinating and it's just such a "fuck off" kind of a song. I really like it a LOT. So it's a clean sweep for the album. Every single track is pretty much a winner for me.
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Reviews from The Guardian, The Independent and The Times:


The Pet Shop Boys: Yes
3 out of 5

Michael Hann
The Guardian, Friday 20 March 2009


So identifiable are the Pet Shop Boys after 10 albums that they have become, to all intents and purposes, the synthpop Ramones. On the fast songs, Neil Tennant offers mildly sardonic observations about relationships, just as he always did, while on the slow ones Chris Lowe provides those polished-chrome synthesised string washes, just as he always did. The only point of difference on Yes is that those sounds were burnished by the Xenomania production team, who (after Saint Etienne and an unsuccesful stint with Franz Ferdinand) are making something of a sideline out of catering to established and strong-willed pop acts. Yes neither benefits nor suffers from Xenomania's attentions - only the opening Love Etc takes a co-writing credit - and it pootles along just as one would expect a moderate-to-strong Pet Shop Boys album to do. There's only the one misstep, Building a Wall, which appears to be about Something Important In Politics, but sadly forgets to make any actual sense while making its point.

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Album: Pet Shop Boys, Yes (EMI)

(Rated 3/ 5 )

Reviewed by Andy Gill

Friday, 20 March 2009

Three years on from the splendid Fundamental, the Pet Shop Boys have ditched producer Trevor Horn in favour of Brian Higgins's Xenomania team, in what seems like a brazen grab for something a little more teen-pop-conscious.,/p>

But, while the results offer perfectly acceptable revisions of standard PSB tropes, one can't help thinking it's all a bit underwhelming. The Xenomania collaboration seems at best unnecessary: it's not as if they couldn't have knocked out a lolloping electro-stomper like "Pandemonium" on their own – or, for that matter, most of the tracks. The main difference is that these performances are both slicker and less memorable than one would expect, while the lyrics, with one or two exceptions, are forgettable rehearsals of romantic clichés barely tweaked into life by Neil Tennant's wry wit. The exceptions again focus on what's getting lost: "Vulnerable" finds him complaining, albeit mildly, about "surviving in the public eye", while "Legacy" betrays the kind of unease at modern life that simply won't register on technophiliac pop kids' radars. Hardly surprising, then, that when he starts unspooling fond childhood memories of Albion in "Building a Wall", Chris Lowe should offer the sarky interjection, "Who'd you think you are – Captain Britain?"

Pick of the album:'Vulnerable', 'More Than a Dream', 'Pandemonium', 'Legacy'


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From The Times
March 20, 2009
Pet Shop Boys: Yes
3 out of 5
Pete Paphdies

There have been times over the past decade when it seemed as though Pet Shop Boys didn’t seem too concerned with sustaining the golden run that took them from West End Girls in 1986 to Go West in 1993. In 2006 even a sumptuous Trevor Horn production on Fundamental struggled to alchemise grumpy-old-man tirades against ID cards and Tony Blair into genius. It’s also fair to say that, as Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe applied the finishing touches to their 2004 soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, emulating Always on my Mind probably wasn’t foremost in their thoughts.

Yet, for all of that, they’ve never stopped calling themselves a pop group. And, as Tennant and Lowe know, pop groups face commercial pressures that don’t extend to other artists. As Lowe put it, “if you’re pop and you don’t have hits, you’ve failed. If you’re Nick Cave, you can just churn out records for years.” If Pet Shop Boys weren’t curious to see if they could still make hit records, they surely wouldn’t have left their “egos at the door” (Tennant’s words) to work with the Xenomania hit factory that has serviced Girls Aloud with 19 Top Ten hits.

That the experiment yielded results we already know. The last of those Girls Aloud hits (The Loving Kind) was one of the tunes “rejected” from the Pet Shop Boys/Xenomania sessions. Furthermore, the avuncular truisms delivered on their current single Love etc have already saturated the airwaves. It suddenly feels as though everyone but a dense minority of Oasis fans “gets” the Pet Shop Boys.

As it happens, Yes feels like a graceful acknowledgement of that affection. If committing feels like less of an effort than it has done with their recent albums, it has everything to do with a slight relaxation of their aesthetic — like visiting a friend who has allowed himself the “luxury” of installing an old, much-loved armchair in an otherwise minimally pristine flat. Featuring Chic-style guitar from Johnny Marr, More Than a Dream reconfigures the positivism of 20-year-old house records for post-Obama times — a sentiment that spills over into the Tchaikovsky-filching, stately electro-pomp of All Over the World.

Few will complain at the elegant way that Vulnerable spiders slowly out from a chord progression redolent of Rent in 1987, less still the way Tennant delivers an achingly tender requiem to a past love. Occupying similar emotional territory, albeit with extra Europop melancholia, The Way It Used To Be has Tennant, in similar confessional mode, questioning the wisdom that old wounds are best not reopened.

It’s not all as good as that, sadly. Once you’ve scraped off Xenomania’s production gravy, Pandemonium and Did You See Me Coming? are very much the dumplings in this casserole. And the most charitable thing you can say about the six-minute closer Legacy is pleasure that Tennant got it off his chest.

What remains, however, is an album that will find a place in the hearts of more than just wishful-thinking diehards. Because it has been a while since anyone imputed them with ironic intent, it seems doubly ironic that Pet Shop Boys had to enlist “outsiders” to make them sound like their own selves. No matter, though. A Proustian rush is still a rush — and there’s no shortage of those on Yes.
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I only vaguely agree with some points, but anyone who describes Pandemonium and Did You See Me Coming as "dumplings in the casserole" really shouldn't be in the business of reviewing music.
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