Pet Shop Boys - Super (2016) [24bit Vinyl Rip]

"I’ve been a teenager since before you were born," Neil Tennant sang on "Young Offender" 23 years ago, a sigh of bravado. The Pet Shop Boys have persisted long enough that their return to club music feels calmly liberated, without any grasping for pop hits—why bother, when EDM already reclaimed that territory? They stood very still while ears craned towards them. 2012’s Elysium had the detachment of a wet stamp, but Electric, recorded with producer Stuart Price, pushed the beats ardently uptempo, the bass leaping between octaves. Electric’s ready-for-the-weekend anthem saw Tennant asking his lover to stay until the end of it, the flirtatious chimes marking time.

The second entry in a planned trilogy produced by Price, Super elaborates and intensifies Electric’s approach: Louder, brighter, more. It doesn’t have the sustained arc of that album, but Price specializes in renovating house and disco, modernizing with care, and his small details still beguile. Amidst the mounting noise of "Inner Sanctum," a single piano note falls as if to the bottom of the ocean. The synths bounce like color through glass. Familiar Pet Shop Boys ideas or tricks appear faintly beneath it all, like they've attacked a palimpsest with crayons: "Happiness" begins as attenuated techno, and then, like "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk," Tennant lays down what might be a country singer’s guide vocal.

These oversaturated shades spruce up a few clichés. "Burn" has a premise older than disco itself (this club will be kindling for our desire), but it plays out as romantic pomp, Tennant’s voice turning hushed and androgynous: "It feels so good, it feels so good, it feels so good." The Boys trusted Price enough to leave several tracks nearly instrumental, but you can sense their editorial hand slackening a little—Super is actually shorter than Electric, yet it runs three songs longer. "Sad Robot World" is an inadvertent Kraftwerk parody; despite the usual nuance ("That’s how you are, or have to be"), "Twenty-something" references smartphones, startups, and "trending ideas" as if practicing a venture-capital pitch.

Super’s best songs are no more subtle, but their noise produces strange contrasts. "The Dictator Decides" imagines an idle demagogue yearning to get strung up by his heels, Morrissey ghosting for Bashar Assad. "Will someone please say the unsayable?" Tennant pleads. "Will someone please tell me I’m wrong? I live every day like a sad beast of prey, for I have to appear to be strong." As he frets over secret prison facilities, the drumbeat marches to swiveling jackboots and distant gunfire. "I’d rather that you didn’t shoot me / But I’d quite understand if you did," he sings, subsuming violence under fine manners in a distinctly English manner. Syria’s ruined borders, after all, were imposed in the first place by a diplomatic baronet.

A Pet Shop Boys narrator is so often the bereft observer: Like Carly Rae Jepsen's characters, they tremble as they ache. "The Pop Kids" distends that feeling back across time, describing two friends who shared dances, favorites, and a passion neither could fully acknowledge. Tennant breathes "Ohhh, I like it here," the sound of someone glancing around and knowing, with wanton contentment, that they would rather be nowhere else. As ’90s house piano swells each chorus, the characters might be thrilling to some Behaviour remix—the Pet Shop Boys are distantly recalling their own past too, memories in a stranger’s dream.