CHATTER AWAY: Overnight Open Thread

January 30, 2020 JMG Community, Open Thread

Metro UK reports:

Pet Shop Boys could be about to net their first number one album in the UK charts for more than 26 years – and we are living for it. The Left To My Own Devices stars – made up of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe – blessed us with Hotspot on 24 January.

According to OfficialCharts.com, the album, which mark’s the band’s 14th offering, is storming ahead in the charts.

This means the duo – who teased a Glastonbury return – could be sat at the top of the album charts for the first time in over two decades, with Very being their last number one record. The band’s last 13 albums have made it into the top 10.

Slant Magazine reports:

Reportedly the last in a trilogy of collaborations with producer Stuart Price, Hotspot is stuffed with instantly infectious melodies and lyrics that flaunt the Pet Shop Boys’s fierce intellect. Eternally sly postmodernists Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are at their funniest here, embedding bouncy synths with barbs directed at failing political institutions across the globe (their own kind of hotspot), social hypocrisies, and even themselves.

A kind of sequel to 1993’s groundbreaking “Can You Forgive Her?,” a song about repressed homosexuality, “Will-o-the-Wisp” finds the narrator running into an old flame on a train and wondering what’s become of him and whether the two will even acknowledge each other. “But maybe you’ve gone respectable/With a wife and job and all that,” Tennant deadpans in a tone of hilarious disdain that suggests no fate could be more horrifying, before delivering the come-on: “Give me a smile for old time’s sake/Before you run away.”

The BBC reports:

Perhaps because we’re so used to seeing them described as “pop’s elder statesmen”, it’s easy to overlook their incredible chart record. Listed in The Guinness Book of Records as the most successful duo in UK music history, Tennant and Lowe have racked up a staggering 44 UK top-40 hits, including iconic and era-defining songs such as West End Girls, It’s a Sin, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Left to My Own Devices and Go West.

During their late 1980s and early ’90s imperial phase – to borrow a term coined by Tennant – they also sent 12 songs into the US Billboard Hot 100. They’ve been even more successful on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart, where they’re the fifth most successful act ever behind Madonna, Janet Jackson, Rihanna and Beyoncé.

Hotspot pivots effortlessly between classic Pet Shop Boys melancholy – see Burning the Heather, which features lovely guitar parts from Suede’s Bernard Butler – and club-ready hedonism, on tracks like Monkey Business, which sees Tennant assume the role of a reckless extrovert.

Hotspot is available for downloading and streaming everywhere. And thanks to our friends at Might Real, we have five CDs to give away.

Simply comment below with “Yes PSB” to enter. Randomly chosen winners will be notified via Disqus on Saturday.




Tags

© joemygod.com 2024