Staff Reviews

Pet Shop Boys - Super

Review by Hayden Woolley

At this twilight stage in their career, it would be easy for Pet Shop Boys to fall victim to making the sort of dead-behind-the-eyes disco that the likes of Madonna has been peddling for the last few millennia»

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Pet Shop Boys release their brand new studio album, 'Super' via X2. Produced and mixed by Stuart Price in Los Angeles, it features 12 new Tennant / Lowe compositions including the lead single, 'The Pop Kids' and it carries on their rich vein of form. 'Super's best songs cleverly subvert the expectations set up by the joyous music. It would be easy to write off lead single 'The Pop Kids' as a mere nostalgia trip, except Tennant has long written about yearning for the past, and its subject isn't so much reliving one's youth as the deep and abiding love of music that got Tennant here in the first place - a recurring theme throughout the Pet Shop Boys' canon, from 'Hit Music' to 'Vocal.' 'Inner Sanctum' is an unapologetic club banger, but one laced with menace, from a weirdly guttural synth line to a warning about fame turning into a kind of blindness, while 'Undertow,' in classic Pet Shop Boys form, juxtaposes bouncy synth-pop with a lacerating message about how love at first sight is really a form of drowning. Even when they're having fun, the Pet Shop Boys never fail to call it like it is.
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