Yes
(I reviewed Fundamental here three years ago so I figured I might as well paste in Yes to go with it. I'm not really sure which of the two I prefer, yet.)
15 years ago, Pet Shop Boys’ fifth studio album Very consolidated the commercial gains of its predecessors with so strong an abandon to mad, passionate synth-pop that it looked like bad manners when it entered the British chart at number one. In so doing, it closed the book on the duo’s life in the top three: over the next decade, they issued a succession of almost apologetically experimental records - all brilliant, all transformative, but all-too-keenly aware of the career to which they added and from which they emerged at ever more distant remove, blinking in the bizarre light of the musical and political landscapes of the developing 21st century.
This latest experiment brings them full circle, with the meat of their tenth album treating the same euphoric heartbreak that sent Very to the top spot. But Yes is by no means fraudulent autopilot. Building upon the black social comedy of 2006’s Fundamental, the LP attacks the historical process, the decade, superiority, and the myth of consistency, but adds to these keen political instincts the Pet Shop Boys themselves. Yes is the sound of a band finally at peace with its extraordinarily successful, extraordinarily inconsistent past; soundtracking governmental collapse with an Owen Pallett orchestral arrangement and a French circus breakdown, seven-minute closer ‘Legacy’ shares a tracklist with songs so reminiscent of late-period ABBA in their astounding disco tragedy that the years since Very melt away. The ambitious electronic majesty of ‘King of Rome’ recalls the post-rave sobriety of Behaviour but adds the dimension of time, Neil Tennant sounding like a desolate, aging Allen Ginsberg when he pleads simply, after a string of dense literary allusion, ‘call me’.
Yet the record is affirmative, even and especially in the face of defeat. ‘Did you see me coming?’ is a disarming sugar rush that dares, outrageously, to fall in love, while ‘All over the world’ joyously marries Tchaikovsky to The Knife. Best of all, ‘Pandemonium’, abandoned in the middle of the LP’s ‘difficult’ half, is an exasperated 12/8 whirlwind which remarks with a poorly concealed grin that it is ‘quite an achievement that, after all, I still love you’. And so with Yes; after four unforgivingly complicated records, its aggressive perfection makes it a challenge to accept on its own terms, but the rewards for so doing are manifold. (9)
15 years ago, Pet Shop Boys’ fifth studio album Very consolidated the commercial gains of its predecessors with so strong an abandon to mad, passionate synth-pop that it looked like bad manners when it entered the British chart at number one. In so doing, it closed the book on the duo’s life in the top three: over the next decade, they issued a succession of almost apologetically experimental records - all brilliant, all transformative, but all-too-keenly aware of the career to which they added and from which they emerged at ever more distant remove, blinking in the bizarre light of the musical and political landscapes of the developing 21st century.
This latest experiment brings them full circle, with the meat of their tenth album treating the same euphoric heartbreak that sent Very to the top spot. But Yes is by no means fraudulent autopilot. Building upon the black social comedy of 2006’s Fundamental, the LP attacks the historical process, the decade, superiority, and the myth of consistency, but adds to these keen political instincts the Pet Shop Boys themselves. Yes is the sound of a band finally at peace with its extraordinarily successful, extraordinarily inconsistent past; soundtracking governmental collapse with an Owen Pallett orchestral arrangement and a French circus breakdown, seven-minute closer ‘Legacy’ shares a tracklist with songs so reminiscent of late-period ABBA in their astounding disco tragedy that the years since Very melt away. The ambitious electronic majesty of ‘King of Rome’ recalls the post-rave sobriety of Behaviour but adds the dimension of time, Neil Tennant sounding like a desolate, aging Allen Ginsberg when he pleads simply, after a string of dense literary allusion, ‘call me’.
Yet the record is affirmative, even and especially in the face of defeat. ‘Did you see me coming?’ is a disarming sugar rush that dares, outrageously, to fall in love, while ‘All over the world’ joyously marries Tchaikovsky to The Knife. Best of all, ‘Pandemonium’, abandoned in the middle of the LP’s ‘difficult’ half, is an exasperated 12/8 whirlwind which remarks with a poorly concealed grin that it is ‘quite an achievement that, after all, I still love you’. And so with Yes; after four unforgivingly complicated records, its aggressive perfection makes it a challenge to accept on its own terms, but the rewards for so doing are manifold. (9)