too much of everything is never enough

I'd started a review of the Pet Shop Boys new album, Yes, yesterday in which I had written that it seemed like the duo were making an homage to the Pet Shop Boys back catalogue. Various songs from Yes sound like the pair at various stages during their career - Vulnerable sounds like it has been lifted from Actually, Pandemonium from Very and King of Rome sounds like the introduction to Behaviour's Being Boring.

Overall, I said, it had just made me want to listen to their last album (2006's Fundamental) which provided that the Pet Shop Boys could still make superb, progressive, celever pop of the highest order.

Two listens later, and I have changed my opinion a bit. I don't think Yes moves the Pet Shop Boys forward in any way and it isn't as clever, nuanced or textured as Fundamental but what it does continue to prove is that there are very few acts in the UK today who can produce such polished, consistent pop music of this sort of quality.

Yes is the Pet Shop Boys at their most simplistic - electronic pop music with clever lyrics, catchy melodies and Tennant's trademark voice. It's poppier than recent efforts - the production input of long-time Girls Aloud collaborators Xenomania sees to that - but after several listens what initially seems like average pop fodder becomes likeable, deep pop music at its finest. From the football-crowd chorus of top twenty single Love Etc to the slow-paced snapshot of 21st century living Legacy the record ebbs and flows in a way only a Pet Shop Boys album can.

It's not their best work and neither will it convert any new fans, but even in 2009 an average Pet Shop Boys record stands head and shoulders above the morass of hopeless pop on show.