I certainly have gone on about how I stopped buying Pet Shop Boys cold before their singles campaign for the “Very” album was fully over. Yes, the dull, soulless daaaaaance music remixes were giving me headaches so if I couldn’t “collect” the group, then why bother, I thought at the time. I sold off all of my CD singles; keeping only the albums. But in listening to the singles one last time, before selling them off, I realized that I needed the B-sides. And the group’s B-side compilations were just the thing to take the place of all of those singles. I got the first one, but in fact, I still need the second one, which is thin on the ground in America.

In 2014, I came across a Pet Shop Boys album I had never seen before in a Goodwill for $1.50. I took the chance and found it to be a great PSB and Trevor Horn album production! Crossing that line, I felt that I should at least get the albums that I had missed since the group were never slackers on the songwriting. No matter how misbegotten the remixes might have gotten.

Eight years later, I came across a similarly inexpensive copy of “Release” in a DLX edition for low cost. At first, it threw me for a loop with the strong [and wholly unexpected] dive into the Laurel Canyon songwriting aesthetic bucket! But after sufficient repeat listens, its weird strengths began to manifest enough to spare it from the discard pile. And now, in the veritable blink of an eye, I’ve actually bought the brand new Pet Shop Boys album upon actually seeing the CD in a store. Goodness knows I have wanted to buy their current CDs for at least a decade, but the store I frequent have been barren of PSB CDs. Will wonders ever cease?

Pet Shop Boys: Nonetheless – US – CD [2024]

1. Loneliness
2. Feel
3. Why Am I Dancing?
4. New London Boy
5. Dancing Star
6. A New Bohemia
7. The Schlager Hit Parade
8. The Secret Of happiness
9. Bullet For Narcissus
10. Love Is The Law

The mystery of orchestral strings drifting up like gas in a sky without rhythm were the unexpected calling card for this album. Eventually, the strings untied and swelled as the Disco beat manifested its relentless heartbeat with the horn section of the orchestra adding their effulgent filigree. Meanwhile, Neil Tennant examined the titular emotional state as is his wont. Addressing his words to a unnamed subject as the hissing hi-hats and four-to-the-floor beats attempted to fill the spaces his lyrics were addressing.

Throbbing synths and drum machines held court for a few bars before the full orchestra joined up with them on the single “Feel.” Mr. Tennant hit the song with the euphoric refrain of “I would never let you down – I will wait” right at the very top of the song. His angelic vocal drenched in choral effects. The disarmingly direct romanticism of the song was possibly a lush riposte to the notion of Pet Shop Boys as habitually drenched in Post-Modern irony. On “Feel” Neil wasn’t hiding behind distance and intellectualism, yet he adroitly name-dropped Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a metaphor. Tellingly, Rossetti was a prime mover of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement. Showing that Tennant took his Romanticism seriously.

The heraldic French Horn figure that opened “Why Am I Dancing?” as the drum machines advanced throughout the introduction of the song spoke to the excitement and hope contained in it. It was a tale of leaving the nest and new beginnings. The story of a young person was examined further with the surely autobiographical “New London Boy.” The title itself was an ironic call back to the 1967 David Bowie song of similar name and theme [“The London Boys”], but while the Bowie tune investigated the cracks in the façade of young independence, here Tennant views the time as having been pregnant with possibilities. As brash and impetuous youth were roiling in the cauldron of their own formation. Forming their queer identity in the process.

The pensive strings that opened the song were soon joined by shimmering synths, doubled with delay, and proto-Hip Hop rhythm track that ironically echoed the band’s own “West End Girls.” The disco ball ambience gave way to a streetwise rapped middle eight by Neil that cheekily quoted the riff from “The Message” as he laid down a rap of the burning urgency of the era.

Ocean and seagull foley effects led us into the pulsating tribute to Rudolph Nureyev that was “Dancing Star.” I loved how the 808 handclaps were spread perhaps too liberally in the mix and even the real strings throughout were overlaid with the impertinence of the Fairlight 8-bit orchestra hit in defiance of good taste.

Next: …Bullets In Bohemia