Pet Shop Boys Very

 Next year Neil Tennant celebrates both his 40th birthday and the tenth anniversary of the first Pet Shop Boys record, West End Girls. Chances are he will look back on a career well past its popular peak yet amply endowed with a solid body of work and an institutional status just to the left of mainstream.

He may also look back on Very as the album which confirmed a group so tightly focused on its strengths to the exclusion of any meaningful experiment that it drives a coach and horses through the First Commandment Of Pop, namely Thou Shalt Explore A New Direction On Every Album. No fresh ground is broken here (though, accompanying the first few thousand copies of Very, the six-track dance-fest Relentless lets sequencer-crazy Chris Lowe off leash), thus while hardcore fans will welcome standards rigorously maintained, fairweather friends might sample the formula, pronounce it the same as before, and move on to more novel fare.

Once more, Pet Shop Boys play with paradoxes. While the title Very perpetuates their delight in oh-so-English conversational tics -Please, Actually-the album physically arrives in a dimpled orange Lego-like case of European over-design masquerading as functional understatement. Slipped from its French tickler housing, Very envelopes Neil Tennant's oh-so-English semi-detached melancholy in a chrome carapace of rather old-fashioned Hi-NRG beats and velveteen synthesizer and orchestral arrangements (courtesy of Anne Dudley; as ever, Stephen Hague produces).

The pumped-up luxury of Chris Lowe's tunes throws Neil Tennant's diffidence into wistful relief, as if both armouring his fusspot vulnerability in I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing and suggesting the sensuality and glamour within reach if only he could cast off his inhibitions. The next song, Liberation, presses the point: yield to his affections, he entreats his loved one, and so free him from the shyness and hedges of uncertainty that root A Different Point Of View and Can You Forgive Her in the conditional mood.

Despite his stardom, repartee, theatrical friends and arrestable headgear, in his songs Neil Tennant remains the bedsit teen on an Awayday to the big city with his nose pressed up against the glittering shop window. His self-thwarting romantic persona peaks in a brace of career-best songs. Dreaming Of The Queen is a comedy which melts into sumptuous sadness, sounding very much as if Neil Tennant sympathises with a monarch beset by her offspring's unhappy endings.

Turning his compassion from high to low, in The Theatre, he cannot square the welcoming gilt and plush of his beloved theatreland with the plight of the homeless over whom one must gingerly step to set foot in the foyer. The glamour Neil Tennant craves has a price in conscience, and the song is a sharply poignant example of Pet Shop Boys' consistent subtext -pleasure, so assiduously longed for, is always tainted by pain.

Offering only the album's closer, a cover of The Village People's Go West, by way of camp flight from reality, Pet Shop Boys' best music almost hymnally tries to reconcile the troubled soul to life's harsh facts. For commercial decline, perhaps read compassion fatigue.

Mat Snow