Pet Shop Boys
Super

Super, thirteenth work by the Pet Shop Boys, is the second in a probable trilogy of albums produced by Stuart Price. For those who don't know, Price, also known under the pseudonyms Jacques Lu Cont and Les Rythmes Digitales, is a DJ who, after an apprenticeship as a rearranger of tracks for famous pop stars, gained fame in 2005 thanks to his contribution to Confessions on a Dance Floor, probably Madonna's last real gem. That very album represented the springboard for his rise as a mainstream producer: his brilliant house-electronic creations that celebrate the glory days of 80s dance (obviously in a more updated form) attracted many stars of the disco ball, from Kylie Minogue to the Scissor Sisters.

The partnership between Price and the duo Tennant - Lowe was born at a delicate time for the duo, in full separation from Parlophone, the label that distributed them since Please, and fresh from the misunderstood, dreamy, and meditative Elysium. For the Pet Shop Boys, entrusting the production of a new album to the creator of the triumphs of Hung Up and Sorry meant re-embracing the pure dance trail that had somewhat been abandoned after Nightlife. A choice that proved to be spot on: Electric is a true unicum among the pop-dance productions of recent years of electronic revival, among the very few albums not to fall into the abyss of excess and trash. A first-class gem, a thoroughly enjoyable tour de force of Saturday night fever tracks, capable of reigniting the passion towards an 80s pop monument which, although annihilated by the sonic and conceptual turnover of the 90s, still managed with admirable dignity to continue on its artistic path without being affected by the physiological decline in consensus.

Preceded by the promotional track Inner Sanctum, Super continues the musical discussion of Electric and imitates its promotional strategies: minimalism of intent, distance from spotlights and charts, sound architecture that often overwhelms the singing, redefinition and updating of past electrodance. But while Electric manifested aggressively, on, fiery, tenacious and rough, a rave party in miniature, Super softens the tones: dance, but not too "violent" and synths, but not too raw. The mood becomes more pop and less "rave" and the songs, though very danceable, do not present that vertiginous dynamism and lack to unleash the exceptional and extraordinary energy that had forged masterpieces like Vocal, Axis, Shouting in the Evening and Bolshy. In conclusion, the second outing of the trio Neil Tennant-Chris Lowe and Stuart Price delivers a more easy and pop dance apology, halfway between the synth revival of Fundamental and Yes and the playful house fantasies of Very.

Happiness, the album's debut, is one of the tracks closest to its predecessor Electric: a pounding techno/house sound circumscribes the only repeatedly sung motif, a pseudo-country styled chant-refrain. It is followed by the single The Pop Kids, closer to the 90s stylings than the 80s, and the peculiar Twenty-Something, a sort of Italian mambo passed through an electronic blender that sarcastically Latinizes just as Bilingual and Domino Dancing did. The triptych composed of The Dictator Decides, Sad Robot World, and Into Thin Air forms the other side of the coin, the melodic, melancholic, and slow-midtempo one. In The Dictator Decides we face a dystopian, anxiety-inducing, and extremely dark electronic composition, complete with a military march and a quote from Vivaldi’s Introduzione al Miserere "Filiae Maestate Jerusalem” (yet another appreciable “cultured” sample from the duo), while Into Thin Air opens to an almost romantically transcendental-dreamlike territory. In between, we must finally highlight the psychedelic - robotic climax of Pazzo! and the synth ecstasy in Burn and Undertow, authentic apotheoses of disco music.

Super is an album that doesn't reach the impressive peaks of Electric but doesn't even seem to aim for such a goal. In their now three-decade-long career, the Pet Shop Boys have almost always, within the common denominator of electropop, harmonized vigor and lightness without needing to create dialectics and categorical clashes between album chapters. Therefore, even Electric and Super do not concern themselves with precedence and succession, evolutions, and involutions, and instead opt for a natural and spontaneous continuation of intent: that of being true and authorized advocates of the times that were, free to offer delightful revivals of the Eighties without the fear of being branded as old-fashioned nostalgic. Because good dance music never retires.