{"id":41021,"date":"2008-07-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/please-further-listening-1984-1986\/"},"modified":"2008-07-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-24T00:00:00","slug":"please-further-listening-1984-1986","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/please-further-listening-1984-1986\/","title":{"rendered":"Please\/Further Listening 1984-1986"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wasn\u2019t all that surprised when the Pet Shop Boys canceled their show at the Hollywood Bowl in late 2006. I was pretty disappointed though. The PSB website blamed logistical problems, which seemed suspect to me. My guess was that the show was canceled due to lack of interest. That made more sense, especially since less than a year before that they had played the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles<\/st1:place><\/st1:city>, a substantially smaller venue. From the get go, I thought it was odd that the PSB would be booked to headline a show at the Hollywood Bowl in 2006; I don\u2019t know that they could have managed that even at the height of their stateside success. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Pet Shop Boys lost steam in America<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> over twenty years ago.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

For most U.S.<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> listeners, awareness of the Pet Shop Boys sort of begins and ends with \u201cWest End Girls\u201d and \u201cOpportunities (Let\u2019s Make Lots Of Money).\u201d Still, the synth-pop duo continues to sell out stadiums in every other part of the world — just not here. Both the Wiltern and Hollywood Bowl shows were in support of the PSB\u2019s excellent 2006 album, Fundamental<\/i>, a strong record that proved once again how successfully the critic\u2019s darlings had managed to maintain their dance culture relevance twenty years after their debut.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

In 2001, the entire PSB catalog — everything up to 1996\u2019s Bilingual<\/i> — received a complete overhaul by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, the gentlemen behind the music. Each album was remastered, repackaged, and expanded in a series called Pet Shop Boys: Further Listening<\/i>. Fantastic sonic restoration, sleeve note expansion with interviews, and a bonus disc of unreleased material made each installment in the series a dream for PSB fans. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

The Pet Shop Boys\u2019 debut album Please<\/i>, the first included in this set, remains their strongest album. It\u2019s a perfect and dignified pop album, one of those debuts that give a clear indication that the artist(s) are going to become something special. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Album opener \u201cTwo Divided By Zero\u201d stands out as one of the record\u2019s finest moments and also one of the best of their catalog: \u201cLet\u2019s not go home \/ We\u2019ll take the late train. I\u2019ve got enough money to pay on the way,\u201d Neil Tennant sings over a thick reverb-drenched synth pad. \u201cWest End Girls,\u201d the song for which Tennant and Lowe are best known both stateside and across the Atlantic<\/st1:place>, is the second track on the album and it\u2019s probably the best song they\u2019ve ever written. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Other monumentally big singles like \u201cOpportunities (Let\u2019s Make Lots Of Money)\u201d and \u201cSuburbia\u201d are nestled between lesser known tracks such as the gorgeous \u201cLove Comes Quickly\u201d and the deliciously remixable \u201cTonight Is Forever.\u201d Overall, Please<\/i> is rock-solid as a single unit.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

The second disc in this set — the Further Listening<\/i> portion — is a real treasure. Disc two finds the PSB in their youngest, most primitive and charming form. Focusing mainly on the 12-inch and 7-inch single versions of both the album tracks and the B-sides, Further Listening 1984-1986<\/i> is a disc every PSB fan should own.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

B-sides \u201cA Man Could Get Arrested,\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s My Impression,\u201d \u201cWas That What It Was,\u201d \u201cJack The Lad,\u201d and \u201cPaninaro\u201d perfectly exemplify and capture the synth-pop-dance-club intentions of Tennant and Lowe. Extended versions of \u201cOpportunities (Let\u2019s Make Lots Of Money),\u201d \u201cWest End Girls,\u201d \u201cLove Comes Quickly,\u201d and \u201cWhy Don\u2019t We Live Together,\u201d are all in perfect pop form here and combined with the B-sides make for an exciting tour through the earliest of the PSB masterpieces.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

In a documentary on fellow synth gurus New Order, Neil Tennant tells the story of the first time he heard the New Order mega smash-hit \u201cBlue Monday.\u201d He claims he began to cry because the track incorporated precisely the kind of sound, texture, and structure that he had hoped to perfect with Lowe. New Order had gotten there first. To a certain degree that\u2019s true; mostly not though. The Pet Shop Boys refined synth-pop and dance music, taking it to the next level. They were the academic and thinking man\u2019s dance duo and were always sort of in a class of their own. New Order has broken up.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

And Pet Shop Boys remain, still in a class of their own.<\/o:p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":29443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7832],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41021","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-pet-shop-boys","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41021"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41021"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}