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Runway songs 20207/8/2023 ![]() ![]() “It’s a Sin” mixes sacred chants with hair metal camp in a satire of anti-gay Catholic doctrine “What Have I Done To Deserve This,” a gorgeously grown-up Dusty Springfield collaboration, teeters between resolve and despair in one of her best performances committed to record. The singles of their imperial phase, which Tennant defines as spanning 1986-88, are among the cleverest to ever top the British charts: as packed as Heaven on a Friday, with any white space filled with cosmic whirrs, plainsong chorales, and heraldic horns. Tennant never wrote a song when it could be a one-act play Lowe never settled for a synth when an orchestral hit could do. ![]() 1 hit, is an irresistible stroke of pop genius enrobed in sophisti-jazz and flared synths, crowned by Tennant’s deadpan hook and a post-“ Rapture” pseudo-rap, and it is still the most concise example of Tennant’s ability to see past facades while also admiring their gleam. All of which is to say that SMASH opens with “West End Girls.” The single, a US and UK No. Underneath an urbane veneer was a vipers’ nest of greed and vice where the only thing that mattered was the cash in your pocket and who you’d got in your bed. This is what we heard: a murderer’s row of fabulous singles from one of the best pop duos to ever do it.īy the mid-’80s, Britain’s Satanic Mills had festered into a waste land of Thatcherite individualism. But there is particular value to this nerdy historicism given the poor cataloging of single edits by streaming services and that the pop single was Pet Shop Boys’ primary way of reaching the great record-buying public. It is also possible to imagine a more nuanced and inventively sequenced gloss of Pet Shop Boys’ career than this chronological survey. Sometimes the single versions here are superior to the album edits, 12-inch mixes, and other edits, but not always. When asked about the omission recently, Lowe replied, “It doesn’t sound like a single.” “New York City Boy” is switched out for its more economical US radio edit, and “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” a 1991 double A-side in the UK with “Where the Streets Have No Name,” is not included. SMASH’s rules of admission here are strict: only officially released singles are included here, and all versions are the 7" or CD versions serviced to British radio, with a couple of asterisks. As the Pet Shop Boys’ fourth greatest hits release, it expands on previous compilations-1991’s Discography, 2003’s PopArt, and 2010’s Ultimate-which are now truncated, dated, or both. Hence SMASH, a towering 55-song remastered singles collection from the pop art fabulists. Go looking for a pop B-side now and you often won’t find much more than sped-up or slowed versions of the main event, but a single release in the pre-streaming era was, Tennant noted in 2020, “More like a manifesto: This is where we are now.” ![]() The duo is one of the few acts that still record B-sides- very good ones-despite these being an endangered species in modern Western pop. It suits the medium and the medium suits them. ![]() Tennant and his Pet Shop Boys bandmate Chris Lowe have made at least six great albums, but their music never met a more elegant repository than the single format. ![]()
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