Pet Shop Boys
Please

THE REVIEW

The boys from the pet shop have been standing at the window for years, observing everything, and they report everything, like impressionable plates, faithfully, in their records, always the quintessence of pop. They document the best and the worst, with disenchanted irony, rarely taking sides (they only recently did: "I'm With Stupid", released in April, is a blatant mockery of Blair's almost amorous submission to Bush), and thus are often accused of a coldness that is perhaps just discretion and common sense.

In this debut of theirs (we're in 1986), they embody the essence of those ambiguous years, so tremendously Thatcherite for them, as well as hedonistic, artificial, glossy, and they render both the surface and the depth of those attitudes, at times going along with their carefree moods, at times overturning them, willingly camouflaging and diminishing themselves.

Put on the record: "Two divided by zero" starts, and within it, you feel a gray subway, maybe at King's Cross (like in the marvelous video Derek Jarman shot the following year for the homonymous piece), you find within those cements, the advertising posters, the formal atmosphere made of briefcases and shop windows, the lights of a consumerist winter, the computerized voices of the supermarket and the stations, the confused and elusive noises of the big city that disorients you. It is a quintessential example of eighties disco-dance, with the addition of the Pet Shop Boys brand, which ensures an ability to penetrate deeply into things while apparently keeping them at a decent distance. Just listen to the lesser-known pieces from this best-selling album: "Violence" is intense despite its cold basic structure, extremely bare, but which the melody excavates, though through Neil Tennant's always watchful and controlled tone. "Later tonight", only voice and keyboards, is a brief elegiac interlude, which in the few central seconds, when the piano remains naked, manages to release and exude the gray-blue drama of those years (which is AIDS, always so creeping in the Pet Shop Boys' albums, silent, insidious, and unavoidable fear).

Dismissing the album's naive and commercial appearance with a few irritated words (in the literal sense of the term, because the Pet Shop Boys sing about shopping) would be an overly easy task. It would be worth instead engaging, challenging the air that smells here and there of naiveté and conformism, immersing oneself without prejudice in this flow of eighties concepts and spirit (and music). Immerse yourself in "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)", a song that became the anthem of a generation of nerd and proto-computerized managers, because it sang self-promotion for exclusive financial purposes, proposing a clever synergy between look and brain applied to technologies. Immerse yourself in "I Want A Lover" and "Tonight Is Forever", which sing of the nocturnal search for love in clubs and places, among rides in strangers' cars and apartments in never-before-seen parts of the city, among carefree abandonments stained with recklessness and guilt. Immerse yourself in "Suburbia", in that somewhat prepackaged portrait of dangerous city outskirts. One would emerge with the awareness that the vision of the Pet Shop Boys is always oblique, multifaceted, never peaceful.

Musically, Tennant and Lowe are already present, here and there at their highest levels: extraordinary ability to create catchy melodies, careful and never kitsch (and thus never reckless) use of electronic means, which Chris Lowe shows he can manage with great mastery (just listen to the first thirty seconds of "Why Don't We Live Together", where the beats seem to intertwine madly), impeccable understanding of the musical moment, where "West End Girls" combines early European electronics with the first cries of American rap. And indeed, it was number one on both the old and new continents. Pop art, in short, that twenty years later deserves a revival, because, if masterpieces perhaps lie elsewhere, honest and intelligent music certainly also lies here.

"Please" already hinted at the Pets' future: an undisputable career, very proper, with very few missteps, always elegant, never banal. It was enough to take a look at the minimal and supremely discreet cover, and the name of the album, chosen so one could enter a shop and politely ask: "Can I have the new Pet Shop Boys album, Please?"

Indeed: precision and courtesy.