Nightlife - Pet Shop Boys

This Pet Shop Boys' release is their seventh album of wholly original material. Their forward-looking approach to music- and song-writing has kept their music fresh with each new album. The unison of contemporary dance music to Tennant's intelligent, emotional lyrics is as good as it always has been. The two opening tracks - 'For Your Own Good' and 'Closer To Heaven' - bring this style sharply into focus. Both are strong dance tunes with clear trance sounds. The former features input from Faithless frontman Rollo (who has worked with PSB before) and is a haunting, pounding track vaguely reminiscent of his own 'Insomnia'. From here the albums dips into ...

This is, in my opinion, the Pet Shop Boys' best album yet (a very close second is 'Behaviour'). Petshop Boys write great pop songs which are about relationships but are written and performed in a way as to not sound 'cheesy'. They started out in the '80s with great electronic tunes such as 'It's a Sin', 'Surburbia', 'West End Girls' and 'Let's Make Lots of Money'. They have worked hard to produce great simple pop songs which are not outdated. I say simple, but Neil writes these cleverly and with humour. This album is their most experimental. The album has a great start with 'For Your Own Good ...

This is the Pet Shop Boys most recent album and, in my opinion, one of their best. As usual, even the up-tempo songs have elements of sadness in them, thanks to Neil Tennant's voice, and the overall feel is quite melancholy which is unusual for such a 'pop' album. Chris Lowe's keyboards sound fantastic throughout and he is clearly very talented, but on this album there are also orchestral arrangements on nearly every track which are of a very high standard as they were written by Craig Armstrong who was responsible for string arrangement on Suede's 'Coming Up' album. Despite getting older, the group are still very much in ...