Fundamentally Yours
If you’ve been waiting for the electro-pop album that speaks to the darkness of our current age, wait no longer.
On Monday, Pet Shop Boys released their 9th studio album, Fundamental, reuniting them with their frequent collaborator, Art of Noise/Frankie Goes To Hollywood/Seal producer, Trevor Horn (who worked with the boys on one of my favourite PSB singles, Left To My Own Devices). It’s a corker.
Highlights include the current UK Top 10 single, I’m With Stupid, reportedly about Tony Blair’s relationship with George Bush, Jr.; a surprisingly effective Diane Warren-penned ballad Numb (grandly arranged) that more or less sums up how most thinking and feeling people have felt since, oh, about November 2000; and the lovely, sublime, emotionally withheld (of course) I Made My Excuses and Left about a man who finds his lover in someone else’s arms (from the sounds of it, in their own bed). There’s also the opener, Psychological, about our current climate of paranoia and fear, followed by The Sodom and Gomorrah Show which recalls It’s a Sin with its unrepentant sensibilities. In fact, they’re all highlights–this is the superbly crafted synth-pop we’ve come to expect from PSB, full of theatrical, cinematic flourishes. (Let’s face it: this is to audio recordings what Baz Luhrman is to cinema.)
The latter half of the album delivers the most political charged material starting with the above-mentioned single and continuing on with a series of songs that speak directly to this dark political age including Twentieth Century (“Sometimes the solution…is worse than the problem”), the highly infectious and catchy Integral (“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear/If you’ve something to hide, you shouldn’t be here”) and one of my personal favourites, Indefinite Leave To Remain, a song that manages to speak to the issue of immigration as a personal bond between people, reminding us that the world is full of human beings, not borders. While it’s become the fashion, if not downright politically expedient, to criticise the U.S., PSB on Fundamental more often stick two fingers up to our own Labour government first. (As they should.)
And if I’m With Stupid is about the smirking POTUS, is it safe to assume that, for my money, the most stellar track on the album, Casanova In Hell, is about his predecessor, Bill Clinton? May-be.
There’s a special limited edition double-CD set that includes Fundamentalism, a CD of mixes from Fundamental and other works. The personal highlight for me has to be The Stuart Crichton Club Mix of In Private, originally written and produced for Dusty Springfield in 1989 as part of the soundtrack for the film Scandal (and charting at No. 14 in the UK). As much as I love Dusty’s original, this version is a dream with a full-throated male vocalist sharing vocals with Neil Tennant and fully exploiting the queer dimension of the lyric about a gay man dating a married man. A very pleasant surprise.
Fundamental is currently available in all its various editions (including additional bonus tracks of song demos at iTunes) in the UK with second single, Minimal, set for release next month. The album will be released in North America on the 27th of June 2006.
Look for some selections from the album to be played on the forthcoming new show which will be the first “official” episode of Up Against It.
