I like the way "Being Boring" begins one way and then turns into something else entirely a minute and a half in. Don't you? You don't? But why in the world not?
Bolting through closing doors. Preaching and teaching the whole world about ecology. From revolution to revelation. Just a boy or a girl. Neil Tennant is endlessly quotable, and I'm convinced it has to be his journalistic background, in part, that makes it such. Knowing just how to nail something down that is a perfect soundbite. But it can't just be that, because then things would be too black and white. That's why when he talks about friends who are missing, you have to connect your own dots about AIDS, but you don't have to accept that explanation. It works in general. In specific, it just cuts that much more deeper. Always the ever multilayered, multimeaninged.
As is the music, and god bless Chris Lowe. I still get a kick out of the fact that Harold Faltermeyer produced it, since all I can think of is the "Axel F" theme from Beverly Hills Cop. Yet here there's little to do with that outside of the Holy of Holies, the synths, and where they go and what they do. And Lowe takes them all these wonderful places. If disco is nothing but Euro strings and clinical projection matches with American beat, then the Pet Shop Boys dare to incorporate the future and the past as well as specific representations. Everything is either regret in reverse or projection ahead to something coming, and nobody knows what. "This Must be the Place I Waited Years to Leave" rewrites all of English history into something that is at once Mary Renault's The Charioteer and Blade Runner, right down to the Vangelis-style keyboard moans that creep in at points, weird signals from beyond a bleak horizon. All is incorporation and supposition, and something slides up your spine even as you dance -- and you can dance, and you should. But knuckle under, since someone had blundered.
"To Face the Truth" is spare, gentle, sweet and barbed, has modern hotel lounge keyboards, gets covered by American guitar indie pop acts like Diskothi-q. They know something, clearly. "How Can You Expect to be Taken Seriously?" gets trumped later by a certain U2 cover, and said band desperately adjust only to look even more tired than they already did, unfortunately for them. Etc. Everyone gets touched by this album at some point or another, it seems. Tennant and Lowe are at once in the middle of everything and perfectly on the fringes. What artist wouldn't give their eyeteeth to be so blessed?
And "So Hard" serves up a big splashy pop song about liars with mock choirs and orchestral stabs that don't sound like every other orchestral stab ever used and video game noises, and "My October Symphony" sums up the Russian nineties before it happened, and with a mid-seventies disco beat and strings at that, and hey, sure. By the time everything shimmers to the various conclusions with "The End of the World" pulsing into an upbeat ending amidst a slight gloom and "Jealousy" turning the end of a romance into something as world-shattering as it feels, orchestras over the full top and horns bearing down over the initial setting, something is deeply, perfectly right.