Penn: Morning Album Reviews — Pet Shop Boys (Finale Part three, day two) (Patreon)

1/18 Pet Shop Boys’ 2013 Electric

Back in April, for New Releases Week (aka Fuck/Marry/Kill week) I declared the Pet Shop Boys’ Nonetheless (marry, of course) to be their best record since Electric, (a sentiment I double down on when moonlighting as an advice columnist)  but truthfully, there’s only one studio album across their 15 spanning the mid 80s to last April that I don’t love, and hell… even that one starts strong, and it has “Dreamland,” their collab with Years & Years, and thus with Olly Alexander, the star of Russell T. Davies’ AIDS drama It’s a Sin. He was a stunning asshole, with one of the most wonderfully upsetting scenes of television I’ve ever watched. He was also the artist who dared to ask all of Europe the vital question “what if Pet Shop Boys, but raunchy” in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, where he was the only act to receive 0 points from the public—even Eurovision was not ready for something quite so horny. (I gave his act 11 points out of 15, ultimately dinging him for the “this performance smells like a gym sock” factor.) If you don’t just inherently want Pet Shop Boys performing with Olly Alexander, I don’t know what to tell you. And like, I’ll give it to them. We were all depressed in 2020. 

So sure, they do the same thing too often. But it’s a really good fucking thing, and it turns out I want, idk, around 10 records of it. It’s not like variations on a style is an uncommon trajectory for a band, and if their records fail to stand out from each other, that also means they just kinda don’t make bad ones all that often. (That said, I do love to see bands doing new things, and that nearly saves Hotspot, only to have the fact that I forget I’m listening to it every time damn it again. Oh well.) 

But it does mean that I’d have a really hard time picking a favorite record from their early career. Damn “West End Girls” (which appeared on their debut record, Please, in 1986, was re-released as a single, hitting number 1 that time in the UK, US, and Canada) and “One More Chance” for being singles in 1984. I would have loved for “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” to have their first single. 

“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks
Let’s make lots of money” 

The ever-tedious existence of linear time means it’s not technically about the band and the decades long career they were about to launch together. Tennant has said that the inspiration for it was actually the (clearly homoerotic) relationship between a con man and a sex worker in the film Midnight Cowboy. Further, Tennant and Lowe are not, and have never been a couple, and their music is written by both of them most of the time; they’ve both got the brains and the looks here, let’s be honest. But close creative collaborations, romantic partnerships, and two-man cons all share a common intimacy, and that song is absolutely about the band, especially given their public-facing introvert/extrovert dualism. (Kieron Gillen once compared his own creative partnership with Jamie McKelvie to this aspect of the Pet Shop Boys, which he describes as “I’m the less attractive one who talks a lot and stands at the front, he’s the pretty one who doesn’t talk at all and stands at the back.”)

Given that all of Pet Shop Boys' fifteen studio albums are top 10 in the UK, I’d wager that they did, in fact, make lots of money. 

They spend the ‘80s inventing the Pet Shop Boys. Please and Actually are 🔥, and even if Introspective is a bit more, well… introspective (Tennant would describe that record, and the single “Domino Dancing,” specifically as where they exited their Imperial phase, coining the term in the process) it is still defining the boundaries that the rest of their career will be responding to and pushing against.

They have a (relatively) chill ‘90s, opening with Behavior, a record veiled in a soft seduction that’s the synth pop version of the gothic, cooling all the way down to mid for a stretch in the ‘00s, until, in 2012, they dropped the legitimately excellent Elysium, finishing their journey from introspective to retrospective. Tennant has called Elysium an album “about growing old,” comparing it to Electric, which is “about remembering that sense of youthful excitement.” 

I’ll happily declare Electric to be my favorite Pet Shop Boys record. It comes out in 2013, right on the heels of Elysium, and much of the music began as unused cuts from it, but Electric isn’t the Amnesia to Elysium’s Kid A—it’s something much more interesting. It’s a bold declaration of a new era for Pet Shop Boys. In fact they tuck that declaration into “Inside a Dream.”

“Taking a ride inside a dream
Living a World I’ve never seen
Wishes come true that should have been
Looks familiar, feels obscene”

This record isn’t declaring a midlife crisis, though. Yes, it has more in common with their ‘80s than their ‘00s, but it isn’t a disconnected grab at a faded youth, or even a new start; it’s a record that refines three whole decades of being the Pet Shop Boys into an emphatic “fuck it, let’s dance.”  In fact, Electric ends on the dance floor with “Vocal,” which would be my favorite Pet Shop Boys song, if I didn’t have that obnoxious personal rule that my favorite record by a band I love can’t have my favorite song on it (‘cause then, are you really a fan of the band, or do they just have a good record?) But “Vocal” is the Pet Shop Boys doing “the music is magic” in such a majestically Phonogram way. 

This is my kind of music
They play it all night long
…
And everything about tonight feels right and so young
And anything I’d want to say out loud will be sung

It’s in the music

Perfect for: Hi, it’s me. I’m the target audience.