Pet Shop Boys
Nonetheless
PARLOPHONE/WARNER
Considering that this month marks the 40th anniversary of their original version of “West End Girls”—initially produced by Hi-NRG king Bobby O. for gay dance music audiences—hearing Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe call Nonetheless their “queer album” seems off. Hasn’t the subtext of so many swirling, synthetic Pet Shop Boys classics been proudly about gay love and culture? Or is it that—at a time when LGBTQ vocalists such as Olly Alexander (with whom PSB have collaborated) and Troye Sivan rule the charts—the duo’s subtly provocative lyrics and edgy electronica is right on time, and pronouncing it as such abets their cause?
Either way, Nonetheless is Pet Shop Boys’ most full-blooded, epic-focused, poignant-and-pithy poetic album since 2012’s Elysium. The new LP is knee deep in sweeping melancholia (“The Secret of Happiness,” “Feel”) and clipped pop songs (“Why Am I Dancing?,” “Loneliness”) where their chipper-music/sad-lyric trick is taken to defiant new heights. Pitched between their stringed collaborations with Ennio Morricone (1987’s “It Couldn’t Happen Here”) and Trevor Horn (1988’s “Left to My Own Devices”), James Ford’s spikey production on Nonetheless lets loose with full orchestration as Tennant—a crooner still standing as the UK’s best answer to the hypothetical, “What if Noel Coward got stuck in a leather bar?”—ruminates over some of Lowe’s most exquisite, Bacharach-esque melodies.
What’s new to PSB’s lyrical rhetoric is Tennant’s confrontation of the politics of gay romance and relationships (the looming “Love Is the Law”) and the treacherous tyranny of so-called kings (“Bullet for Narcissus”), where thought bubbles become proactive speeches yelled out loud and made anthemic. With that last new item on the Pet Shop Boys’ ledger of things to accomplish, the greatest of British pop duos are heading into their 40th year of unity even more proactively than when they started.
