When Neil Tennant left his job at Smash Hits to concentrate on the Pet Shop Boys, the magazine published an obituary announcing that the band wouldn’t last six months. A full twenty years on, Tennant and Chris Lowe are still very much around and truly alive. But is high energy still relevant today? In the case of the Pet Shop Boys it appears that, despite their last album, Release, being mostly based around a guitar/bass/drums structure, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant have continuously adapted to the ever-changing club culture, cleverly twisting it to fit their unique pop sensibility.
Founded in the early eighties after Tennant & Lowe bumped into each other in an electronics shop on the Kings Road in London, the Pet Shop Boys brought a touch of art school elitism to the effervescent dance music scene. Alternating between studio albums, remix projects and various collections, the band have over the years fully exploited their image while maintaining a fine balance between pop and dance.

Almost as famous for their extremely pertinent B-sides, used for their more experimental songs, as for their more mainstream work, Tennant and Lowe have proved to be one of the only enduring acts of the eighties. Following Disco, released barely a few months after Please, their first album, and Disco 2, published eight years later, this third installment contains a handful of reworked versions of tracks lifted from Release. Unlike the two previous Disco offerings though, this album also features five previously unreleased dance tracks recorded during the Release sessions. At times evocative of the limited mini-album Relentless, released as an add-on to Very back in 1993, the album kicks off with Time On My Hands, a Kraftwerk-meet-New Order electro mutant reminiscent of the band’s Two Divided By Zero in some ways, and features both Neil and Chris on vocal duties.

Finding themselves at the heart of the eighties electro revival, the Pet Shop Boys embrace once again the sound which took them to the top of the charts, first with the hands on Positive Role Model and dreamy Try It, then later with If Looks Could Kill. Cleverly mixing their high energy with the roots of their sound, Tennant and Lowe emulate some of the best moments of their career and demonstrate that, despite the conformist sound of Release, they still have the inimitable touch that has become their trademark. Other highlights of this album include the Thee Radikal Blaklite Edit of London and the Superchumbo mix of Sexy Northerner, originally the B-side of Home & Dry. The PSB extended mix of Here is also well worth a listen, if only because it was by far the best song on Release. The album, surprisingly, closes on a low key with a piano version of London, as heard on the band’s last tour, bringing the high level of energy right down before the band eventually walk out, almost unnoticed.

Neil Tennant has proved his old workmates very wrong, and together with Chris Lowe, the Pet Shop Boys have definitely shaped up part of the pop musical landscape of the last twenty years. Despite not exactly pushing boundaries much these days, it is through their more demanding work, on B-sides and on projects such as this one that the Pet Shop Boys prove to be the most relevant of acts