Shop Boys New Single Release: Home & Dry

Parlophone Date Added: 3.3.2002
A new release from the Pet Shop Boys will be presented through Parlophone on April 1st.

Pet Shop Boys' latest recordings build on their acclaimed reputation for lyrical empathy and exquisite aural construction. 'Home and Dry', taken from the forthcoming collection, 'Release', represents a new development in Pet Shop Boys' stylistic range, employing guitars and traditional rock sounds and the duo's trademark electro-virtousity to create a fresh, emotionally-taut soundscape firmly situated within a classic pop structure.

'Home and Dry' (radio edit) CD1 is a deceptively seamless construction, both lovelorn and anxious. Its memorable hook pervades the apparently effortless gloss of the production with persistence, all the more insistent for it's modern elegy of hop-to-be-confirmed.

At the same time, 'Home and Dry' confirms the continuing ambition of Pet Shop Boys work, capturing within it's timeframe their essential allure in a new configuration of love confounded or confirmed, the traumas of modern life. A world made smaller by its technological advancements but made more remote by those same developments.

Yet for all it's implied sense of loss 'Home and Dry' exhibits a sweet sophistication in the optimism of the returning object of desire (every love, any love); a healing coda to traumatic times expressed in the archly beautiful lines; 'There's a plane at JFK/To fly you home from far away/All those dark and frantic/Transatlantic miles'. It is a sentiment elegantly embodied by Neil Tennant's yearning lead vocal, and counterpointed by Chris Lowe's subliminal refrain.

Charactistically, 'Home and Dry' comes packaged with other new tracks. The ambient mix of CD2 uses a floating version of the Tennant acapella, with a new chord change from Lowe. The result is an abstract expansion of the original. The driven energy of 'Sexy Northerner' suggests a more hard-edged portrait of regionality and lust. An alien arrival in London (a recurrent and key figure in Pet Shop Boys world) who 'drinks a lot of beer/'least he doesn't smoke', is permanently disconnected by both his own aspirations ('Don't you dare imply/That it's grim up North') and his self-conscious yet nonchalant appeal. With his sexy grin and apparent availability, he is an urban operator and ubiquitous object of desire - as Tennant sings, almost wistfully, 'How does he do it?'.

It is complemented by 'Always', a deceptively yielding yet resistant ballad, finely threaded through its own resurgent hope: 'Summer comes/Always'.

The release culminates in the insistent, unbound desire of 'Break 4 Love', a collaboration with Peter Rauhoffer which has already been No.1 in the US Billboard Dance Chart and hitherto available her only on import.