- Pet Shop Boys duo Neil Tennant & Chris Lowe have said that each album they create is a reaction to the previous release, so 2013’s Electric with its very dance/pop base was a reaction to the smoother, rarefied pop-ery of Elysium of 2012. Two years on from Electric, they now give us Super which in the Pet Shop Boys’ way of using irony to its maximum allowable extent, can be monikered as, “Super Pet Shop Boys!” or “Pet Shop Boys, Super!” complete with a large day-glo pink spot bearing the album title in hi-vis yellow on the cover. Here’s the thing – is it a “reaction to” Electric or have they delved into some newer territory as well as mining bits from their past, while keeping the strengths of their last album (the dance/pop tracks) under the same producer, Stuart Price?  As the French say, comme ci comme ça.

Also, a marker of the Pet Shop Boys releases was the belief that Tennant wrote the more whimsical, introspective tunes (like Being Boring from the 1991 Behaviour or Leaving from Elysium) and Lowe the more dance club bangers. This new release, number thirteen in their studio album catalogue is almost an album of two halves – there’s the whimsy, the clever lyrics and the wry observations and then there is straight out of a deep, dark Euro dance club; beats, loops and keyboard runs that are a hallmark of the Pet Shop Boys sound.

Super opens with four bright pop tunes – Happiness, The Pop Kids, Twenty-something & Groovy, as usual, the titles beguile the listener to the actual lyrical content. The first single, The Pop Kids, is a reflective lyric on the passing of time and the simpleness of youth which is contrasted with Twenty-something which critiques the shallow bitterness of current life against a novel syncopated rhythm -which is something new for the Pet Shops Boys- and the album opener Happiness also explores a personal journey “…it’s a long way to Happiness, a long way to go; but I’m going to get there, boy, the only way I know…” with a driving beat over an almost wordless verse and then tripping into a sunny, almost Beatles-eque chorus, again something new for Tennant and Lowe to offer the listener.

More familiar ground is reached a third of the way through the album when the mood changes after the disco fuelled Groovy via the ominously titled The Dictator decides. Heavier, industrial beats now take over and once the reflective “dictator” show his vulnerable, confused side (“…I’m too weak to be strong…”), pure Pet Shop Boys dance music flows with Pazzo! (a colloquial Italian word for “madman”),  Inner Sanctum (a pure piece of Euro industrial dance pop) and Undertow, which continues the theme of uninhibited dance. For some this could be just so much sugary, repetitive beat making or, alternatively, it gives this album the feel of a work of two halves – both introspective and expressive.

The last four songs ebb and flow, Sad Robot World is another Pet Shop Boys standard – poignant thoughts on a Blade Runner like society in which we are all well enmeshed; Say It To Me goes over the grounds of a love that is both unrequited and half-done; Burn does exactly what it says on the label, “…we’re going to Burn this disco down before the morning comes…it feels so good…” and would have made a good ending for the album, but there is a twelfth track on this thirteenth album. Into Thin Air, opening with the sounds of cello in slightly maudlin tone before the deeper beats kick in and the incisive lyrics, a little like a surgeon’s knife present themselves, “Too much ugly talking…we need some practical dreamers…” and “We’re different from the others, no-one understands us here, imagine how free we will be, if we disappear…”

While some have never understood the Pet Shop Boys nor why thirty years later -well into the own personal 50s and 60s- they are still making new music. There’s little chance they will disappear, “into thin air” with Super. 

- Blair Martin.