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Rating: 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.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) (03:44)
I've got the brains
You've got the looks
Let's make lots of money
You've got the brawn
I've got the brains
Let's make lots of
I've had enough of scheming
And messing around with jerks
My car is parked outside
I'm afraid it doesn't work
I'm looking for a partner
Someone who gets things fixed
Ask yourself this question
Do you want to be rich?
I've got the brains
You've got the looks
Let's make lots of money
You've got the brawn
I've got the brains
Let's make lots of money
You can tell I'm educated
I studied at the Sorbonne
Doctored in mathematics
I could have been a don
I can program a computer
Choose the perfect time
If you've got the inclination
I have got the crime
Oh, there's a lot of opportunities
If you know when to take them
(You know)
There's a lot of opportunities
If there aren't, you can make them
(Make or break them)
I've got the brains
You've got the looks
Let's make lots of money
Let's make lots of
Money
You can see I'm single-minded
I know what I could be
How'd you feel about it
Come and take a walk with me
I'm looking for a partner
Regardless of expense
Think about it seriously
You know it makes sense
Let's (Got the brains)
Make (Got the looks)
Let's make lots of money (Oohh money)
Let's (You've got the brawn)
Make (I've got the brains)
Let's make lots of money (Oohh money)
I've got the brains (Got the brains)
You've got the looks (Got the looks)
Let's make lots of money (Oohh money)
Money
05 Suburbia (05:05)
Lost in the high street, where the dogs run/
roaming suburban boys/
Mother's got her hair do to be done/
She says they're too old for toys/
Stood by the bus stop with a felt pen/
in this suburban hell
and in the distance a police car/
to break the suburban spell
Let's take a ride/
and run with the dogs tonight/in suburbia/
You can't hide/Run with the dogs tonight
/in suburbia
Break the window by the town hall
listen! A siren screams/
there in the distance like a roll call
of all the suburban dreams
Let's take a ride/
and run with the dogs tonight/
in suburbia/
You can't hide/
run with the dogs tonight/
in suburbia
I only wanted something else to do but hang around/
I only wanted something else to do but hang around
It's on the front page of the papers/
This is their hour of need/
Where's a policeman when you need one/
to blame the colour TV?
Let's take a ride/
and run with the dogs tonight/
in suburbia/
You can't hide/
run with the dogs tonight/
in suburbia
Suburbia/
where the suburbs met utopia/
What kind of dream was this?
so easy to destroy?
Man who are were to blame
For the sins of the past?
These slums of the future?
suburbia/
where the suburbs met utopia/
suburbia/
where the suburbs met utopia
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