Pet Shop Boys - Electro-pop, heads down

In the sleeve notes to Catalogue, the lavish coffee table book published in 2006 to celebrate the duo's first twenty years, Chris Lowe (synthesizers and programming, Blackpool, 4 October 1959) sums up the Pet Shop Boys' aesthetic like this: "I think there's a dilemma between wanting to be yourself or something else, and you keep jumping between the two...", while Neil Tennant (voice, guitar and keyboards, North Shields, 10 July 1954) calls it "a nice representation of why everything is wrong". Two statements that (it's worth saying) sum up the communicative power of a duo whose influence has always gone, and still goes, well beyond purely musical elements.

Standard-bearers of a postmodern aesthetic that draws on the most varied influences and a deep sense of opposites (bordering on existentialism: just think of their ability to portray a certain joie de vivre and existential unease with equal effectiveness), Tennant and Lowe have carried out a sociological-musical operation that, for all its apparent simplicity, has little to envy in the more celebrated cultural constructs of bands like Talking Heads and Devo (from the latter in particular the Pet Shop Boys picked up the most iconoclastic spirit). What has made the duo's experience truly unique, though, is their ability never to surrender fully to the monolithic intellectualism (image included) that by the mid-80s had already made even Byrne himself, or giants like Kraftwerk, look dated. At least until 1994, Tennant and Lowe instead offered a sonic and visual image that was far removed both from the political commitment of the 70s and from Reagan-era hedonism, so much so that people spoke of a "post-punk" altered more in form than in substance, the product of a difficult musical individualism, hard to grasp but with subtle and fascinating fruits.

It all begins on 19 August 1981, when, in an electronics shop on King's Road in London, Tennant - at the time an editor at the teen magazine "Smash Hits" - meets architecture student Chris Lowe. The two discover a shared background, above all a passion for Berlin-era David Bowie: otherwise their stories are quite different (though it's precisely in that difference that the duo's chemistry lies). Tennant was something of a minor celebrity on the Newcastle scene, where in the 70s he had played in a few local folk-pop outfits. After studying piano and trombone, Lowe had instead discovered the world of electronics, and had already grasped one of the many paradoxes that would animate the Pet Shop Boys: what inspired him was not so much reverence for the aforementioned Kraftwerk as certain minor Italo-American disco that nonetheless seemed, in its own way, to capture punk-rock's most authentic spirit. New York is in fact the key city for understanding the world of the Pet Shop Boys: the city where, in that same 1981, the expressive fury of no wave was fading into the vacuous jazz of the Lounge Lizards, and where a certain Madonna was taking her first steps.

The hero and mentor of the early PSB-branded works is, moreover, Bobby Orlando, a producer of modest fame (and even more modest budgets) who over the years would be remembered chiefly as one of the first dance artists to use front-men and front-groups for his productions. One of these, the Flirts' "Passion", proved decisive in redirecting the sonic ideas of the young Tennant and Lowe, who, judging by their early demos (now widely available online), had seemed rather closer to an electroacoustic version of the then hugely celebrated Soft Cell. Tennant meets Orlando in New York in August 1983, and within a few months Tennant and Lowe are in his studio recording the first sketches of future classics such as "West End Girls", "Opportunities" and "It's A Sin". Orlando's production stamp is evident in the prominence of synthetic percussion and in the indiscriminate use, on both slow and fast tracks, of cheesy sound effects (animal noises, cowbells, guttural grunts); here and there, though ("I Get Excited", or the first, exquisite version of "I Want a Lover", later included on Please), one can already begin to hear the future balance between unusual chords and rhythmic oscillations that would make the group's fortune.

An initial version of "West End Girls" (hampered by a decidedly raw vocal take) comes out on Epic in 1984 and earns some success in Europe; but by this point Tennant and Lowe's ambitions have already grown, and their determination not to waste a track as precious as "West End Girls" would be behind the long negotiations that, the following year, brought the duo to EMI. Orlando receives a substantial pay-off, but the label spares no expense to secure the promising act.

In the air one can already sense the rapid decline of other giants with feet of clay like Duran Duran and Tears For Fears, and the first fresh vibrations of electro and house are being felt. Not much of this transition is audible, however, in the group's debut album, Please (March '86), which stands out above all as the worldwide revelation of a striking image. The minimalism of the almost entirely white sleeve, the refusal to smile in promotional photos, the enigmatic approach to videos are not so much a rejection of the prevailing hedonism as a shift in its meaning: thus the same album can house a side A that is, in a sense, more "engaged", with the bitterness-laden invectives (lyrically too) of the reworked "West End Girls", of "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)" and "Suburbia", while side B makes room for the square, brazenly sensual disco of "Tonight Is Forever" and the mannered vocal flourishes of "Why Don't We Live Together".

Musically the album still bears the imprint of Bobby Orlando's legacy: the orchestral flourishes that would later become one of the group's trademarks are absent, while the focus is on the relationship between rhythmic structures of unusual power for the pop world and their opposite, the long sustained drones that underpin above all the fragile, almost adolescent "Later Tonight". The original version of "Violence" also stands out (later remade less convincingly in 1993), a mid-tempo track that brings the PSB back, for the last time, to their New York, electro and hip-hop roots, in a remarkable dialectic with the peculiarity of Neil Tennant's nasal (yet perfectly enunciated) voice.

The album is a huge commercial success, prompting EMI to strike while the iron is hot with a negligible remix mini-LP, Album, notable only for a brilliant extended version of "Suburbia".

Between 1987 and 1989 Tennant and Lowe go through a period of great creativity, helped also by their refusal to perform live except on rare occasions. The diptych Actually-Introspective would make up what Tennant calls their "imperial period", marked by three more UK number-one singles: "It's A Sin", "Always On My Mind" and "Heart".

Actually (September 1987) includes the last leftovers of the Bobby O period, giving them a more accessible but no less radical guise. The opening "One More Chance", from a naive high-energy trifle, turns into a relentlessly precise house machine. The duet with Dusty Springfield, "What Have I Done To Deserve This", is another big commercial asset, though it works mainly as a soft-disco reinterpretation of certain 60s melodic structures (a vein Tennant in particular would mine further in the years to come).

Other tracks are grittier, such as "Shopping" and "I Want To Wake Up", where Chris Lowe shows great technical skill in his ability to keep inventing rhythmic patterns without any real tempo changes. "It's a Sin" (curiously covered over the years by more than one metal band) is an early exercise in theatrical grandeur, but in its "hyper-Catholic" satire of Catholicism it also confirms the duo's taste for cinematic, atmospheric sound effects - almost suggesting a more elaborate narrative quality that Tennant also develops in his lyrics, less intimate than on the previous record and more inclined towards explicit criticism of prevailing Thatcherism.

The orchestral grandeur (though still achieved by electronic means) of "It Couldn't Happen Here" and the sense of desolation that comes through in the closing "King's Cross" are nonetheless the most mature pages the group had written up to that point, while the single "Rent" revisits the erotic allusions of Please in a less industrial guise, closer to Kraftwerk's rare, genuinely pop moments (it's impossible not to think of the all-time classic "The Model").

The period of great popularity during this time leads to the first missteps along the way, from a bad experimental film ("It Couldn't Happen Here") to Results, an album recorded (on the suggestion of Gene Simmons of Kiss!) in 1989 together with Liza Minnelli, who is visibly uncomfortable reinterpreting Tennant and Lowe's songs.

The PSB, on the other hand, keep their best cards up their sleeve for another pair of hugely valuable albums, though very different from one another. Introspective (October 1988) and Behaviour (October 1990) are the duo's last "classic" albums, and gather their greatest inspiration.

The six tracks on Introspective stand as one of the few album-length documents of the thriving house scene of the era, devoted entirely to singles and remix culture. The choice to present the new tracks in 12" format and then edit them down for single release is highly unusual, but the production possibilities offered by the "extended" format seemed almost inexhaustible at the time. It's no coincidence that Trevor Horn was brought in to produce - a sort of Phil Spector of our times, less obsessive but just as intent on building a "wall of sound" in which it's not only "Che Guevara, Debussy and disco" that collide (the memorable couplet from the opening "Left To My Own Devices") but also the Beatles. What comes out is a great melting pot that leaves behind the restrained sobriety of their early work, launching into the dionysian crescendo of "I Want A Dog" (a b-side masterfully reworked by Frankie Knuckles) and "It's Alright", the latter present here in a version that's actually more successful than the bland "single mix" from June 1989. Synthetic choirs and looped orchestral sounds, newsreel fragments, the Cuban ensemble that turns "Domino Dancing" into an indecipherable blend of kitsch and elegy, all wrapped in the usual percussion that seems to coil back on itself in liquid shapes, well before jungle ever got to that idea; and then there's the very Art Of Noise-like sarcasm of soprano Sally Bradshaw intoning a single word ("house") in the long orchestral intro to "Devices".

A luminous, intoxicating record, one that represented for the late-80s generation what the "Sgt. Pepper's"/"Magical Mystery Tour" pairing might have been twenty years earlier.

The anticipation for Behaviour instead leaves both critics and audiences partly disappointed, even though the record has aged remarkably well over time and has earned more praise in retrospect than it did on release. The idea of returning to the sound of the pre-Please era pushes Tennant and Lowe to work with producer Harold Faltermeyer, a former collaborator of Giorgio Moroder. The recording sessions, however, take an unexpected turn, as if the album were taking shape on its own. Far less energetic and danceable than expected, Behaviour is nonetheless an extremely interesting record for the way it reinterprets Moroder-esque sounds, transforming them into a particularly fluid continuum, like a kind of relentless background music that does everything it can to avoid becoming muzak. Especially effective in this sense are the voice-and-Moog layering of "To Face The Truth" and "Only The Wind", as well as yet another intro loaded with samples and analogue sounds that leads straight into the brilliant chord-to-chord simplicity of "Being Boring".

The lyrics are also worth noting: despite the music's shadowy mood, Tennant has fun building Escher-like temporal puzzles ("This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave", a follow-up to "It's A Sin" that's less striking but just as sharp in its critique of the English education system) and poking fun at the environmentalist posturing and pacifism of Sting and Bono ("How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?", indeed, how?). Closing the album, almost as if to seal a masterful creative era, is one of the absolute peaks of their output: "Jealousy", written in 1982 and released eight years later, sums up everything that the whole of Actually had failed to achieve, with a splendid fluidity in moving from the body of the song (one of the last appearances of piano on a duo album) to an orchestral coda where the repressed energy of the preceding four minutes finally lets loose.

Having reached their creative peak, a slow and largely dignified decline begins.

As early as 1991, Tennant and Lowe seem eager to leave behind the essentialism of Behaviour with a world tour ("Performance") that, for its flamboyance and cost, would be compared to the Waters-era Pink Floyd "wall". 1991 is also the year of their meeting with theatrical costume designer David Fielding, who together with the duo would devise one of the most startling aesthetic turns pop has ever seen.

Associated from the very start with a cool, detached image, for Very (September 1993) Tennant and Lowe subverted their own aesthetic canon in a thoroughly postmodern creative reinvention, one already partly anticipated by the 1991 single "Dj Culture" ("Decide it's time to reinvent yourself/Like Liz before Betty, She after Sean/Suddenly you're missing then you're reborn"...). Just as the PSB had stood out with an almost puritanical image in the era of George Michael and Duran Duran, the explosion of grunge and the consequent rejection of much of the previous decade's music pushed Neil and Chris into an act of "subversion" aimed not so much at Cobain's or Vedder's music itself, but at grunge fashion as a routine almost automatically embraced by the public.

Hence the total anti-realism of the videos directed by Howard Greenhalgh, in which the pair move through computer-generated settings full of garish colours and improbable looks. The video for "Can You Forgive Her?" would go down in history above all: loosely inspired by Salvador Dalí's 1930s works, it features Tennant and Lowe in white and orange jumpsuits and conical hats that humorously evoke the world of school (one of the classic themes in Neil Tennant's lyrics).

In this triumph of visual ideas, though, the album itself risks being overshadowed: Very, which from its very title is an album "more PSB than the PSB themselves" – not without self-irony, an early sign of mannerism. The idea of translating into sound a colourful, euphoric dance-pop, partly inspired by Neil Tennant's coming out (he confirmed his homosexuality in 1994 in an interview given to Attitude), still leaves room for a few darker moments ("Dreaming Of The Queen", a new Elgarian march through the paranoias of the English middle classes; "To Speak Is A Sin", another languid recovery from the early-80s archives; the disorienting "Yesterday When I Was Mad", marked by constant tempo changes and a veritable jumble of vintage sounds lifted from old and new video games).

The first copies of the album came bundled with an instrumental mini-album, Relentless, almost entirely composed by Chris Lowe, which further expands on the concept of the main record. Never reissued, Relentless is today a rarity that bears witness to a particularly inspired creative phase, not least in terms of sheer output. Lowe tackles a different expressive formula on every track: the house sound more familiar to the duo on the fun "My Head Is Spinning", techno on "KDX 125", jungle and dub cadences (filtered, however, through its author's architectural sensibility) on "The Man Who Has Everything". The experiments attempted on Relentless don't stand in too radical an opposition to the melodicism of Very, though, and mostly indulge in sampling exercises of real quality. Worth mentioning is the closing "One Thing Leads To Another", the only sung track, in which Tennant uses a "backwards" narrative technique to tell one of his usual tales of sexual repression and frustration.

Returning to Very, though, not everything works, including the odd slip into the obvious (the syrupy "One In A Million") and a production in which the "wall of sound" lacks the same freshness of ideas as in the past. Such is the case with the controversial cover of the Village People's "Go West" (the original plan, incidentally, had been to cover the far more neutral Beatles track "The Fool On The Hill"), their last major commercial hit and a masterclass in how a clever cultural operation (the lyrics added by Tennant and the video shift the song's meaning from a celebration of San Francisco's gay community to a reflection on post-communist Russia) can be overwhelmed by a production that isn't equally refined, to the point of risking misunderstanding about the meaning of the whole operation.

What's more, if the PSB of 1985 could sing on "Opportunities" "I've got the brains, you've got the looks, let's make lots of money", thereby feigning to adopt the capitalist outlook they were actually criticising (a thoroughly punk move), the paradoxical accusations of "hedonism" they received were a sign of just how effective that operation was, and of how sterile the dominant ideological positions of 1980s society really were. The disorienting move pulled off once again with Very is far harder to repeat in the face of a society that, in the 90s, was instead searching for sincerity and realism, however confused the forms it took.

That's why Bilingual (September 1996) lacks neither ideas nor commercial success, but does offer something to criticise sharply. For a group that has always operated with an obsession for standing apart from conformism and ideology, the bland spirit of the 90s (musically represented by Britpop) simply isn't "interesting enough to criticise". Bilingual is thus a fallback, a record one could say represents for the world of pop what Led Zeppelin's "Presence" represented for rock: a work that is in some ways still energetic and creative, but shot through with a creeping listlessness, at once too focused and too confused, like a pair of glasses worn by someone whose eyesight is still perfect. Once again, the original project (this time a Latin American-themed record) was transformed during the recording sessions, which this time dragged on for almost two years, involving various high-profile producers (Danny Tenaglia, K-Klass, Chris Porter) and significantly diluting the final result.

A controversial and extremely uneven record, but also more varied than its predecessor, Bilingual is a kind of collage of "electronic world music" in which the songs themselves become increasingly less relevant. The opening one-two punch of “Discoteca/Single” is a mini-suite of great expressive power, helped along by the Sheboom percussion ensemble, which across the track's eight minutes conjures an "acoustic" version of the rhythmic sleight-of-hand found on Please. What follows is a decidedly half-hearted “Metamorphosis”, a Behavior leftover that gets by mainly on a pleasant use of horns (as the closing “Saturday Night Forever” will also do, elevated by an ecstatic, sweeping bridge). “Electricity” reworks the old “Violence” into fashionable new hip-hop cadences; the singles “Se A Vida E'” and “Red Letter Day” (the latter barely more than a demo in the version that made it onto the album) instead kick off a tendency to rewrite “Go West” that would drag on for years. Far more successful is the following “It Always Comes As A Surprise”, which opens with the usual understated intro (complete with an Astrud Gilberto sample) before blossoming into a slow number of great sensuality and tenderness. From here the album gradually fizzles out, amid a few echoes of lesser New Order (“Up Against It”), an anonymous “Before” and further self-quotations (“The Survivors” borrows the funk structure of “Liberation” from the previous album, which was in turn heavily derived from “Being Boring”).

The most interesting release of the period is certainly Alternative, a double CD collecting b-sides recorded between 1985 and 1995. The thirty tracks on the compilation stand as exemplary proof of the band's expressive growth: from the rough high-energy of “A Man Could Get Arrested” to the sonic collages of “Paninaro” and “Was That What It Was”, right up to the expressive maturity of “Miserablism”, built entirely around a Shostakovich sample.

Above all, though, Alternative makes it possible to tell apart, more clearly than on the official albums, the distinct styles of Tennant and Lowe: the former's melodic gift often expresses itself through chilly homages to his literary and musical models (Satie in “Jack The Lad”, a graceful reworking of the Gymnopedies; John Betjeman in the wistful “Your Funny Uncle”; but also the crooning of Cole Porter and Noel Coward in the polished jazz of “If Love Were All”), while Lowe, freed from the pressures of the official albums, reveals himself to be a decent singer too (“We All Feel Better In The Dark”), though he generally prefers to run free in structural experiments and rhythmic flourishes that give melody and chord changes room to shine (the joyous finale of “I Get Excited”, perhaps the band's best house track, but also the tamed hardcore of “Music For Boys” and the unsettling post-electro of “Some Speculation”).

Nightlife (1999) and “Closer To Heaven”, the musical tied to it (2001), represent the lowest point in Tennant and Lowe's creative arc. Rumours of internal friction, plummeting sales and a climate still unfavourable to old synth-pop glories all led to an album that doesn't even reach the creative peaks of its predecessor, relying entirely on techno-trance producers like Rollo and David Morales, who leave their mark on dull, overlong tracks such as “For Your Own Good” (lifted wholesale from any given Faithless album) and on the melodramatic tango of “I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Anymore”. The only track to have any lasting hold on the public will be the insipid “New York City Boy”, while the unusual pseudo-country cadences of “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk” dart in and out of the UK top ten in January 2000.

Even the duet with Kylie Minogue, “In Denial”, is a missed opportunity, laying out over the usual slow orchestral backdrop the same sentimental stereotypes (the gay dad, the “responsible” daughter...) that would also undermine the musical mentioned above. Running for six months at London's Arts Theatre, “Closer To Heaven” at least avoids rehashing old hits, but for the first time critics and audiences alike respond negatively to a set of songs that could easily be (and sometimes are) Very leftovers or, at best, Behaviour b-sides (“My Night”, “Vampires”, the embarrassing stab at r'n'b on “Out Of My System”).

The slow creative climb back begins in the warm spring of 2002, with the release of Release: a genuine act of contrition for the excesses of recent years, this time more warmly received by critics than by die-hard fans. With the orchestra and the glitter put aside, Tennant dusts off the acoustic guitar, and (gasp!) a flesh-and-blood drummer makes an appearance (Jodie Linscott). The experiment works, even if sales remain low.

The “new Pet Shop Boys” that Tennant presented on the tour of the period don't entirely give up easy self-quotation: “E-mail” reuses the famous bassline from “West End Girls”, while “I Get Along” rounds off the stylistic exercises built on the theme of “Go West”, this time in a late-britpop key. Elsewhere, though, there's a poetic intensity that had been missing for some time: among the best moments are the Velvet-like crescendo of “Birthday Boy”, the feather-light electroacoustic etchings of “The Night I Fell In Love” (which jokes, not too subtly, about a possible homosexuality on the part of Eminem) and the single “Home And Dry”, which settles a decade-long score with Sting by rewriting “Every Breath You Take”, but without a trace of pathos. The only link to the past is “The Samurai In Autumn”, a kind of ingenious “haiku” set to trance cadences that self-mockingly revisits the point of no return reached during the Nightlife era (when the band had adopted a disconcerting look built around Japanese ceremonial robes, sunglasses and orange punk wigs). Also memorable is the video, directed by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who, to illustrate the song's theme (a longing for domestic calm), films with striking narrative effectiveness the rats that swarm the tracks of London's Underground stations.

An album without any grand sonic ambitions for the first time, but for that very reason full of an honesty that, after several years, rekindles public interest, by now ready for that '80s neo-revival which, a decade on, still shows no sign of letting up.

Fresh signs of vitality also come from subsequent projects: the remix album Disc 3 (February 2003) rides the wave of the emerging electroclash trend, pairing a few interesting reworkings from the latest album (chief among them an amphetamine-fuelled version of “London” courtesy of Felix Da Housecat) with unreleased material dating back to the early '80s, while the soundtrack composed for Sergei Eisenstein's “Battleship Potemkin” is performed live in Trafalgar Square, London, before an audience of 20,000. The soundtrack confirms the duo's growing interest in theatrical elements, and although it's perhaps a touch too linear and “narrative” in following the film's plot down to its least significant details, it confirms the rediscovered creative vein of Tennant and Lowe, who try their hand at industrial minimalism, Depeche Mode-style clangour and unexpected string flourishes far removed from their usual restrained style of writing. Also striking is the choice to include three sung tracks, among the most important on the soundtrack (“No Time For Tears”, its hurried closing reprise titled “For Freedom”, and “After All”, which accompanies the famous Odessa Steps sequence), perhaps more out of fear of straying too far from traditional creative standards than as an experiment.

Traces of this pop-industrial sound also resurface, in part, on Fundamental (May 2006), yet another exercise in Bowie-esque reinvention in both look and sound. The Pet Shop Boys' “Victorian” album is, curiously, also one of their most “romantic” works in the literary sense of the term, which doesn't rule out a fair dose of cynicism; to polish up a record largely handled by the duo themselves, Trevor Horn is brought in, limiting himself to refining the material with a few production touches, often kept quite low in the mix and only noticeable after several listens (like the wind effect that closes “Luna Park”, or the sonic “joke” in “Casanova In Hell”, where the words “He couldn’t get an erection” are followed by a descending brass scale).

The album's sonic spectrum, which Tennant himself has no qualms calling “Pink Floyd-esque” (indeed, the magnificent brass-band horns that open “Indefinite Leave To Remain” sound as if lifted straight from “The Final Cut”), once again sets dance music aside: while the opening of “Psychological” is deliberately halting, built on the same narrow sound palette used for the Potemkin soundtrack, the single “I’m With Stupid” plays on subtle house echoes that recall Gerald Simpson's “Hot Lemonade”, while “Minimal” is less a dance track than a lesson in style aimed at copycats destined for swift oblivion, such as Fischerspooner.

For the rest, the orchestra once again takes centre stage, in a lavish but never gratuitously sentimental outpouring of violins, harps and horns that manages to make even “Numb” sound credible — a song written by Diane Warren (the songwriter specialising in tear-jerkers like Aerosmith's “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing”). Elsewhere, the aforementioned “Luna Park” winks at the darker side of Air, while “I Made My Excuses And Left” shows a renewed ability to capture the spirit of the times, in a 2006 where disengagement from the horrors of politics no longer wears the face of the old “paninari” but that of a simple withdrawal from romantic entanglements. Only the closing “Integral”, with its filtered vocals and unmistakable, repeated “orchestra hits”, truly picks up the pace, without, however, leaving much of a mark melodically.

A solid, workmanlike record, far from past musical peaks but certainly superior to the three previous studio efforts. But the “new best” has yet to come for Tennant and Lowe.

If the foundations of Fundamental lay in Potemkin, the songwriting of Yes also shapes the duo's most recent work to date, “The Most Incredible Thing”. This is the music for the ballet staged in March 2011 at Sadler’s Wells in London. Across the soundtrack's nearly 90 minutes, the Pet Shop Boys finally find the experimental courage that was entirely missing on “Closer To Heaven” and partly missing on the Potemkin score. Inspired by an evocative H.C. Andersen story about a competition to find “the most incredible thing”, the ballet is in fact almost entirely instrumental, and largely the work of Chris Lowe.

The meticulous work of writing and production carried out for Yes, based largely on riffs and melodic ideas juxtaposed in sequence, finds a natural outlet in this project, and in particular in the excellent suite “The Clock 1-12”. The clock is the magical object that comes to life each hour, revealing humanity's and art's great achievements: great storytellers and, at the same time, great mannerists, the Pet Shop Boys here devote themselves to a “catalogue of possible dances”: from the waltz (which had already made an appearance on Legacy) to the rubbery house of “The Winner” and “The Clock 5”, from the Spanish-tinged airs of “The Meeting” to the astonishing “The Grind”, which, to depict the daily routine of life in the kingdom where the ballet is set, relies on a non sequitur of industrial percussion, chamber horns, deliberately decelerated pop-disco excerpts, ambient stasis and sudden rock-leaning openings, going well beyond the timid approach attempted on Release.

Among the duo's finest works outright, this is almost an ideal rereading of Introspective, and confirmation of a creative sturdiness that, after the crisis of the late Nineties, has rediscovered an enviable freshness.

After releasing a third, superfluous greatest-hits collection (Ultimate, featuring the unreleased "Together") and the double album with the music for the ballet "The Most Incredible Thing", the Pet Shop Boys released a second b-side anthology titled Format in early 2012. Nearly all the extra tracks from Bilingual through the more successful Yes are here, with the exception of several covers (for instance "Je t'aime… moi non plus", "Sail Away", "My Girl" by Madness, "I Cried For Us" by Kate and Anna McGarrigle), a rare remake of the hit "Alone Again (Naturally)" and "This Used To Be The Future" with Philip Oakey. While not quite on par with Alternative, the new anthology still contains a good number of tracks that are anything but leftovers: "The Truck-Driver And His Mate" (a tribute to the britpop of the Gallagher brothers) and "Sexy Northerner" have also been performed live on several occasions, "Hit And Miss" is a bittersweet ballad that winks at Pulp, while the jungle-inflected "Betrayed" recalls "Walking Wounded" by Everything But The Girl (Tracey Thorn would later return the favor by reinterpreting "King's Cross" from Actually). Other highlights from the double CD are "Casting A Shadow" (commissioned by Radio One), "The Ghost Of Myself", "Blue On Blue" and "No Time For Tears". "We're The Pet Shop Boys" is a reworking of a My Robot Friend track that Neil and Chris also reinterpret together with Robbie Williams for the latter's ill-fated album "Rudebox". Once again, the booklet includes an interview given by the Pet Shop Boys to Jon Savage.

Honored in 2009 with a Brit Award for lifetime achievement, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are the most successful pop duo in the history of popular music. Their influence on the fortunes of contemporary pop is first and foremost sociological and cultural, having shown how electronic music can be a stimulating vessel for cultural influences, lifestyles and visions of everyday life that are often different yet coexisting; but even on a purely musical level, their ability to reread musical traditions, even relatively recent ones, from unobvious angles (combined with an attention to every detail of design and to the multimedia potential of their work) has never compromised a first-class expressive clarity and melodic gift, now acknowledged as such by international critics and by newer generations of pop acts like Lady Gaga, Killers and Mgmt.

Announced as a return to the hushed atmospheres of Behaviour, Elysium (2012) is instead one of the duo's least immediate and most heterodox works, close both musically and thematically to the controversial Bilingual. Recorded in Los Angeles under the supervision of Andrew Dawson (a collaborator of Kanye West and producer of Fun's smash "We Are Young"), Elysium is bookended by two songs destined to become rightful classics of the group, sitting at opposite extremes of their songwriting. If the opening "Leaving", with its interplay of contrasts between a stripped-down beat and soul vocalizing, is a clear nod to their early minimalism, the closing "Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin" succeeds where mid-Nineties records like "Bilingual" itself had failed: an inspired play of funk light and shade, choral textures and Latin-American rhythms that manages to successfully stop short on the slippery threshold of "camp". In between sits a handful of songs that continue down the path traced by the previous Yes (2009) and push it to extremes. The underlying electro sounds grow ever more jagged, even brushing against the "interlude" format on at least two occasions: the angular "Your Early Stuff" and the hilarious "Ego Music", a caustic collage of self-referential global-popstar ramblings in pure Lady Gaga style: ⟦Q1⟧; the arrangements, long one of the strong points of Tennant and Lowe's songwriting, move between a few concessions to stadium pop (the Olympic single "Winner" and the plodding acoustic ballad "Breathing Space", the album's only weak moment) and still-unexplored territory: the curious "baroque gospel" of "Hold On" (based on a composition by G.F. Handel) and the bucolic accordion of "Give It a Go", which sounds as if lifted straight from REM's "Green"; and the melodic trip-hop experiments of "Invisible" and of an "Everything Means Something" that wouldn't have been out of place on the Depeche Mode's "Exciter". More than thirty years after their first musical experiments, the Pet Shop Boys are still thoroughly vital, and the challenge is all the more decisively won given that it's played out on a record that, from its very title, is a concept piece about death and failure: the "Elysium" of the title is that of success and victory, which, Tennant seems to suggest, is inevitably followed by oblivion and a fall into the pathetic; but at the end of the road, for the first time in the Pet Shop Boys' journey, there emerges a sense of peace, an elegiac resignation to the sheer effrontery of time passing.

From Los Angeles to Chicago: the house, trance and techno atmospheres that dominate Electric (x2, 2013) are not a disavowal of Elysium, but rather cast new light on its predecessor and its intangible atmospheres. As Chris Lowe explained, if Elysium was a record about incipient old age set against the youthfulness of pop music, the concept behind Electric is "rediscovering the things you liked when you were young". There's plenty going on, then, but only nine tracks, nearly all of them close to six minutes long; and above all a "young" reading - meaning never so wild, instinctive and extreme, with no half-measures - of those great emotional swings that have always characterized Tennant-Lowe's best compositions.

A case in point is the hardcore haiku of "Shouting in the Evening", one of those semi-instrumental interludes Tennant and Lowe have accustomed us to since the days of Release, in which this time they trade blows between a techno harder than the duo has ever attempted (verging almost on Underworld territory) and guileless breaks that could easily have punctuated Elysium itself.

After all, evening is the moment when one prepares for the end of life, but it's also when one gets ready to go out and hit the club: hence the opener "Axis", which races at breakneck speed through tunnels designed decades ago by mentor Bobby O; followed by the purest daylight, Balearic glow of "Bolshy" (accompanied by robotic Russian voices, immediately overturned into the surly hi-NRG Marxism of "Love Is A Bourgeois Construct"), the new-wave roller coaster of "Fluorescent" (night returns, with a "Fade To Grey" poisoned by time having passed), the optimistic Los Angeles autobahn of "Inside A Dream" and the innocent early-Nineties trance-hardcore revivalism of the single "Vocal".

Less effective, on the other hand, is the cover of the Springsteen-esque "The Last To Die", where even a solid rhythmic frame isn't enough to offset the populist banality of melody and lyrics; here we're in less PSB territory and more Killers territory, not coincidentally the favorites of "Electric" producer Stuart Price (already responsible for the temporary commercial and artistic "disco" rebirth of Madonna in the middle of the last decade). Another Price protege, rapper-singer Example, drops in with a cameo at the end of "Thursday", overturning with acidic yet healthy realism Neil's dreamy invocation, kept half-hidden in the mix besides (⟦Q2⟧): yet another acrobatic reversal capable of vividly showing the many faces of love and the passing of time.

After all, "⟦Q3⟧", as Tennant sang in "Leaving", the somber opening track of Elysium. Electric, then, is the Pet Shop Boys' "time regained". Having finally reined in their tendency toward orchestral ballast and filler that was sometimes undercooked (or sometimes overdone, as occasionally happened on Elysium), with Electric Tennant and Lowe rediscover their youthful verve, but without pretending that their time hasn't passed. Just as in the masterpiece Introspective, it's once again the expressive and communicative power of Chicago house - with the endless, sensual luminosity of its circular grooves - that fuses present and memory, day and night, vitality and death, still in 2013 the true sonic heart of the Pet Shop Boys' output.

The second chapter of a trilogy is almost always the hardest to pull off, especially given the difficulty of repeating the surprise effect that drew attention to the first installment: a rule from which not even Super (2016) is exempt - a clear transitional work (pending a third album that will presumably slow down the BPM count) which, despite Stuart Price's return behind the mixing desk, fails to repeat the miracle of Electric.

The return to more traditional songs with shorter running times ends up clashing with the aggressive EDM atmospheres already tried out on its predecessor. What's missing, meanwhile, is that fine work of loosening up the arrangements that updated the illustrious model of Introspective and had given the 2013 album remarkable coherence and cohesion.

As if trying to avoid too close a resemblance to Electric, Tennant and Lowe somewhat forcibly reintroduce a handful of atmospheric slow numbers, which, as it turns out, are actually the best things on the record: above all "The Dictator Decides", built on a fragment of Vivaldi, with a vocal part curiously close to Dylan's on "Oh Mercy" and a classic Tennant-esque historical-sociological paradox (can there exist a dictator who, weary of his role, asks to be overthrown by a revolution?), while the rarefied "Sad Robot World" sounds like an outtake from the underrated Royksopp's "Senior".

Even on these more contemplative tracks, however, Price trots out his trademark bag of tricks - distortions, loops and crescendos that end up feeling out of place and paradoxically anesthetize the potential of many songs, especially in the second half of the record. Both the faster "Undertow", "Say It To Me" and "Burn", as well as the closing "Into Thin Air" (a classic escapist midtempo of the kind only Tennant and Lowe can pull off), end up weighed down by predictable rhythms and by the hammering, overly repetitive use of vocal delays, and are unlikely to join the classics of the Tennant-Lowe catalogue.

The about-turn the Pet Shop Boys chose to give their music after the much-criticized stasis of "Elysium" remains admirable. The impression, however, is of a record with no great sparks nor great missteps, one that grows on repeated listens but won't rank among the duo's most memorable pages. This time Tennant and Lowe's gaze has clearly turned toward the least happy period of their career, namely the late-Nineties of "Bilingual" and "Nightlife" (the former echoed in the mannered piano house of the single "The Pop Kids" and in the reggaeton-electro-folk experiment "Twenty-Something", the latter in the dull late-trance of "Inner Sanctum" and in the schizoid house-country of opener "Happiness"), curiously falling back into the same expressive gaps and lack of clear sonic direction that undermined the effectiveness of those two albums.

Recorded at Berlin's historic Hansa Tonstudio (the same studio behind, among other things, "Heroes" and "Low"), Hotspot is steeped in the moods and symbols of the German capital, drawing on train rides to well-heeled Zehlendorf or the iconic turquoise tiles of the Alexanderplatz subway station (which adorn the cover of the single "Dreamland"). A genuine act of love for the city, the record mainly captures its age-old, foggy melancholy, triggered by the postwar divisions and persisting to this day amid a wearying resistance to gentrification.

The feeling is translated into music through numerous ballads, which if they don't outright surpass the tracks with more prominent beats, at least match them, drawing a fil rouge with 1990's “Behaviour” (the quintessential moody Pet Shop Boys album). The most beautiful, as well as the most powerful at conveying its wistful yet comforting mood, is “Burning The Heater”, brushed as it is by a guitar riff from ex-Suede man Bernard Butler and adorned with delicate xylophone notes.

Among the livelier tracks, the europop of “Happy People” and “Dreamland” stand out, the latter almost sounding like a passing of the torch. It's handed over to the young but already seasoned hands of Years And Years, as Olly Alexander's and Neil Tennant's voices intertwine in a sweet electropop embrace. “Money Business”, on the other hand, chosen as the third single no less, feels somewhat clumsy and forced.

There's barely time to wonder whether “Wedding In Berlin” is dedicated to the multicultural neighborhood north of Mitte or actually alludes to an actual wedding in Berlin, before samples of Mendelssohn's wedding march are interpolated into the sharpest techno beat of the bunch. The genuinely punchy rhythm and the duo's innate charm aren't enough to save the track from being crowned the worst closing track of their career.

Their fifteenth album is titled Nonetheless and also marks their return to the illustrious Parlophone, the label that signed them and brought them success. On this occasion too, the Pet Shop Boys keep up their perpetual tradition of identifying their official releases (the studio ones) with a single word, always and only.

Their career is studded with commercial successes that need no further elaboration. It's more worthwhile, instead, to dwell on the consistently high standard that this pairing, born by chance in an electronics shop back in 1981, has always maintained throughout these decades of activity.

Nonetheless is a commemoration of the passions that define everyday life.

With their proverbial care for content, Tennant (whose voice sounds almost identical to how it did at the outset) has penned reflective lyrics that drive home certain social and personal situations plain for all to see, especially for those living in the UK today.

Between danceable numbers and introspective ballads, every track carries its own narrative thread, contributing to a bigger picture that builds toward an overarching goal.

It's fair to say that this new work adds nothing to their already glittering track record, but once again Neil and Chris pull it off with their usual skill, a good dose of romantic revivalism, and their ever-undiminished precision.

Contributions by Francesco Giordani (“Yes”), Alessandro Liccardo (“Format”), Michele Corrado (“Hotspot”) and Cristiano Orlando (“Nonetheless”)

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