The deadpan duo of Tennant and Lowe have never been easy to suss out at the best of times: maybe their way of layering wackiness on deep seriousness, eyebrow-flickering subtlety on roaring camp, giddy frivolity on erudition, has been their way of staying fresh. The Gilbert & George of British pop, they live to perplex even into middle age and beyond. But even given all that, quite what they're doing starting an album with “Happiness”, a hokey country and western hoedown mixed into the thumping EDM of modern American raves – sounding like Major Lazer going crazy on the chewin' tobacco – is quite a puzzler.
It's especially peculiar, given that the rest of the album is standard Pet Shop Boys through and through. “Twenty Something” finds their songwriting tidily skewering the mores of life under Conservative rule just as it was when they first began. “Undertow” and “Burn” are timeless poppers-scented peak-time club anthems, crying out for belting diva cover versions, while “Inner Sanctum” delivers late-nineties Ibiza trance leavened with Tennant melancholy. The state-of-the-modern-world “Sad Robot World” could be silly but the combination of dead-straight delivery and luscious orchestration renders it sublime – and the same goes tenfold for album highlight “The Dictator Decides”. For the rest, there's nothing terrible, though it feels quite arbitrarily constructed with a bit of filler.
Maybe they just like to wrongfoot people. Maybe they've essentially been a cult act for so long that they want to put off anyone who's not willing to make the commitment of listening to the whole album. Maybe they genuinely want to make a “Cotton Eye Joe” for the 21st century. Maybe an act who – the odd experimental side project and the occasional adoption of a new club trend apart – have essentially not changed their modus operandi for their entire career just want to do something wild and new. Who knows? Whatever, it's a very horrible start to an album that otherwise shows them just as they've been for a very long time: still capable of heartbreaking beauty among the layers of inscrutability.
