Nightlife

11/02/1999 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Ken Barnes

When you're talking Shop, little seems to change. Fifteen years after "West End Girls" first materialized, the Pet Shop Boys reliably supply the expected. Opener "For Your Own Good" sports the sort of cantering disco rhythms that flourished when Bronski Beat still walked the earth. You also get tormented, cleverly constructed love laments delivered in Neil Tennant's dry, semi-detached tones...and a Pet Shop staple: song titles so long a reviewer could use up his allotted word count quoting them all. At least half the songs are bedecked with hallelujah choruses of soaring angelic massed vocals, which get annoying fairly quickly.

As do a lot of the ballad-tempo numbers ("Footsteps, "The Only One," the vaguely Bowie-esque "Boy Strange") and especially the gloomy musings of "Happiness Is An Option." "Vampires," despite its subject matter, New Orleans locale, and lite-funk arrangement, is too effete to conjure the hoped-for, red-beans-Anne-Rice effect. And on the deftly written "In Denial," Kylie Minogue demonstrates that on the PSB duet scale she's no Dusty Springfield.

More appealing on this mixed-bag offering are the sweetly brooding "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk," metaphorically nifty "Radiophonic," and "New York City Boy"'s bittersweet Latin-disco celebration, cherishable if for nothing else than the chance to hear Tennant solemnly intone "the hoochie's unreal."