dark (Nightlife - Pet Shop Boys)

Member Name: SkyscraperFanClu

Product:	Nightlife - Pet Shop Boys
Date:	03/04/09 (8 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An imaginative and intelligent dance album, emphasising the endless flexibility of electronic music

Disadvantages: 'The Only One'

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 various other genre, often with great success. 'Happiness Is An Option' sounds like the best thing that ever happened to R&B. 'You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk', the highest charting single from this album, even throws country-esque guitar twangs into the PSB dance blend.
There is, sadly, one moment where the whole thing nearly falls flat on its' face. 'The Only One' is, as Chris Lowe notes, 'What (The Pet Shop Boys) would be like as a boy band', but this really isn't a good thing. It lacks the sophistication which gleans the rest of the album.
Following 'The Only One' comes a pair of cracking songs. Neither are particularly accessible on first listen, but with time their quality shines through. The music to 'Boy Strange' swells in intenisty in perfect sympathy with some of the most elegant lyrics ever written:

"In the eyes of the world, he's a borderline fool,
Both naive and cruel"
'In Denial' features Kylie Minogue's vocals, sung deep in sharp contrast to Tennant's higher pitch, as the two roll out an emotional song in conversational form about a father coming to terms with his homosexuality.

Only the Pet Shop Boys would set themselves so rigid a design constraint as focussing an entire album on songs set at in the night. But they have done so magnificently. You might expect it to make logical sense to argue that, after seventeen years of songwriting, the Pet Shop Boys Boys are losing their touch. This album, however, proves otherwise.

Summary: great dance album