Album reviews, plus David Kettle on the hidden talents of composer Alma Mahler
There’s a spry freshness as much as a comforting familiarity to the latest album from the Pet Shop Boys
POP
Pet Shop Boys: Hotspot
Twin Atlantic: Power
Virgin EMI Eminem: Music to Be Murdered By
Shady/aftermath
Like a synth-driven Ramones, Pet Shop Boys have now entered their fifth decade of producing the-same-but-different sound, whether writing songs for the Fringe hit Muzik and Hanif Kureishi’s stage production of My Beautiful Launderette or their own albums of wry party pop and wistful electro contemplation.
Once again, there is a spry freshness as much as a comforting familiarity to their 14th studio album. Hotspot is billed as the last of a trilogy produced by Stuart Price, a kindred spirit of synth pop, and there is further continuity in electing once again to write and record in Berlin, one of the world’s great artistic cities.
Berlin is the setting for the dreamy odyssey You are the One, while the throbbing techno mantra Wedding in Berlin is a semi-satirical catalogue of marital platitudes. There’s a nod to Germany’s most influential musical export (and we’re not talking Boney M) on Happy People, which recalls Kraftwerk in its precise, sonorous synth lines before they set off on a Euro expedition with an outbreak of Italian piano house circa 1990 and a signature spoken word narrative from Neil Tennant. Nothing we haven’t heard before yet delivered with a playful finesse.
Dreamland takes its lead from the pomp synths of their own It’s a Sin, then dovetails into a frothy confection which could have been produced in the German and Dutch disco pop factories of the 70s. This duet with the similarly reedy Olly Alexander of Years and Years is a classic call for escapism and much of the album follows in that disco tradition.
I Don’t Wanna is a carefree club track about not wanting to hit the dancefloor but Tennant and keyboard compadre Chris Lowe have shrugged off their reluctance by the time they get to Monkey Business, a hedonistic cocktail of bubblegum electronica, climactic disco strings and Tennant’s knowingly rubbish attempts at rap.
The one track recorded outside Berlin – at RAK Studios in London with guest guitarist Bernard Butler
– is a different prospect. Burning the Heather is a leisurely, bucolic vignette featuring such lyrical nuggets as “sheepdogs are running hell-forleather” and “I’m not one of those breadheads, always pounds, shillings and pencing” delivered in Tennant’s unmistakeable deadpan tones, which shows that they can still throw a curveball when they fancy.
Glasgow’s Twin Atlantic return as a trimmed-down trio on a new label with a new style to the windowdressing around their commercial Scot pop rock sound. There are shades of their countrymen Gun on the slick electro rock of Oh! Euphoria! and of Chvrches on the pumping electro pop/rock of Novocaine. They come to life like a latterday Simple Minds on turbo-charged and snakehipped I Feel It Too and are open about the influence of Depeche Mode on the moody, mid-paced electro pop of Ultraviolet Truth and the portentous Messiah ,allof which may translate happily to their forthcoming set at TRNSMT but makes for derivative home listening.
11th album has landed without warning, kicking off with the Alfred Hitchcock sample which gives the album its name. Music to Be Murdered By is hip-hop’s answer to the murder ballad, namechecking notorious figures from John Wilkes Booth to Osama Bin Laden and generally following the perpetrator’s point of view, from the disturbing planned patricide of Stepdad to the sinister single Darkness, which threads a mournful musical reference to Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence through a bleak chronicle of the 2017 Las Vegas shootings. There is light relief from guest Ed Sheeran trying to keep up with a buzzing Eminem on Those Kinda Nights and the breakneck fuzz punk fun of Yah Yah, plus expert changes of pitch and pace, from the wired Little Window to the low-slung Lock It Up with Anderson Paak.
There are shades of their countrymen Gun on of Oh! Euphoria! and of Chvrches on the pumping Novocaine