Pet Shop Boys - Release

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Track List: Release

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Album Details: Release

Release Date:: 04/23/2002
Label:: Sanctuary Records
UPC:: 060768455320

User Reviews: Release

their Everyman album -- well, not for ev
, June 14, 2002
Reviewer: A (Dubious) National Secret - See all A (Dubious) National Secret's reviews

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1 of 2 Yahoo! Users found this Release review helpful I am glad that Neil and Chris are still sending out their distinctly intelligent and musically rich brand of pop music. It manages to put to shame Mad-donna, Titney Spears, The Backside Boys and N*Stync, and all others that are considered pop artists but are neither pop nor artists; rather, they are the most dissmissable crap-merchants in the music world.

So that is why it pains my heart and ears to hear the Pet Shop Boys dumbing themselves down considerably in search of a far wider audience. What happened to their pledge made in "How I Learned To Hate Rock & Roll" back in 1996? Apparently they have decided to go rocking, against their own grain, and it does not suit them. Neil Tennant playing guitar? Other than a few half-hearted strummed chords on an electric on the B-side It Must Be Obvious, Tennant and Lowe have left the rocking to others. How can it BE? Well, they are joined by Smiths alum Johnny Marr, now freed from the Electronic side project shared with New Order's Barney Sumner. After all, he spiced up Behavior (1990) considerably, considered by many true devotees to be their best single album. But to reach new fans is it necessary to try to sound like a 1990s era Duran Duran mixed with Moby? And the vocoder bit is getting old again. In the pop biz everyone and their grandmother is using it right now, and it is wearing paper-thin, with apologies to Roger Troutman's ghost. Save it for the pop princ-es and -esses who can't carry a tune without crutches.

The "New" sound works admittedly well of Home & Dry and I Get Along (the first and second singles, respectively) and on the occasionally laugh-out-loud The Night I Fell In Love, but the acoustic guitar-heavy base does not fare as well on Birthday Boy, the melody of which sounds like a hopeless alt rock ripoff of Only The Wind from Behavior. Speaking of which, The 'Boys seem to be trying to make self-duplication into an artform: Witness London and E-Mail -- melodically identical to You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk and West End Girls. On their website they only admitted the stated duplication on "E-mail". The fact that it can be found so easily by fans is a sad statement on what ideas remain within two once very fertile musical minds. Love Is A Catastrophe delves into an emotional side rarely seen in Tennant's vocals. Judging by the result, it should not be seen. The more detached feeling of You Choose rescues that track somewhat, though.

When they stick to their "Old" style: No guitars, with multiple keyboards and driving drum loops , the result is more pleasing, and indeed gives this almost fifteen-year fan reason to keep buying their new stuff. The almost wordless The Samurai In Autumn is a masterpiece, and Here manages to come off like a pleasing (though slightly plodding), more current amalgam of Always On My Mind and I'm Not Scared from the golden early days of PSB.

Bilingual was interesting, though not without stumbles, and Nightlife was a masterpiece at times, despite the presence of the fun but highly vacuous New York City Boy. But despite several acute pleasures, Release overall is not worth the pain. I bought the UK version of the album (Coming in a red metallic-finished outer slipcase and distinctive white jewel case) and the Home and Dry UK singles (with a visually utilitarian style usually not seen on PSB single inserts; they look like damn construction signs), just so I could hear everything before most of the U.S. fans (Singles on March 21st, album on April 11th). They now go onto the glass shelves of my twin Ikea bertby CD cabinets alongside better albums and better days, to wait with me in hope that this slightly irksome experiment will not continue to their next album when it is out in '03 or so. Chart success is risky to gain at the expense of your core audience. Be careful, Boys. ...

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From AMG Reviews

The Pet Shop Boys have never made a bad album, but with Nightlife, they started to seem a little worn out, as if they had explored their sound as far as it would go. But Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are among the smartest, pop-savvy groups to ever record, so they not only realized they were stagnating, they knew what to do about it, bringing Tennant's Electronic partner and former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr for several songs, and moving the group toward careful, considered, mature pop for their eighth album, Release (another pun-worth title, worthy of Please). For most artists, the adjective "mature" would seem an epithet, but here it's an accurate description for this elegant, eloquent, knowing music -- it's maturation achieved through experience and worldliness, not an exorbitant bank account. On that level, this is about the most mature pop album released this decade, exhibiting a refined sense of craft and a keen sense of purpose, marrying the particular sentiment of a song with the right production. It's hard to call Release an album of its time, since it hardly falls prey to trends, but it's aware of its time -- an album that's proudly out of step with the particulars of hipness, but knows what they constitute, knows what they feel like, knows what modernism means for somebody who's lived their life with the burden of being hip, whose always felt a compulsion to stay on top of things -- and feeling that desire fade as you get older. So, that means that while Release occasionally sings of the new -- synth lines, vocoders, beats, a song designed to respond to Eminem's homophobia (the exquisite "The Night I Fell in Love") -- it's from the vantage of people who have lived through all of this before, and know particulars will pass while the song remains the same. The great thing is, even if this sentiment has been present in previous Pet Shop Boys albums, they have brought the dance-club to the background (partially due to Marr's presence) and have brought the songs to the forefront, resulting in a record that feels like the Pet Shop Boys, even when it doesn't sound like them. And that's a good thing, since it retains their greatest attributes while giving them a new spin, and it makes for the best Pet Shop Boys album in nearly ten years.

- Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

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Postmodern ironists cloaked behind a veil of buoyantly melodic and lushly romantic synth pop confections, the Pet Shop Boys' cheeky, smart, and utterly danceable music established them among the most commercially and critically successful groups of t...Full Pet Shop Boys Biography

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