"Can You Forgive Her?" (1993)

[listen]

Let’s talk about Very, the fifth album by the Pet Shop Boys. It came along late in 1993, off the highs of their imperial phase in the late ‘80s, when they were giving away songs and producing albums by the likes of Liza Minnelli and Dusty Springfield. It’s the follow-up to what is actually probably their most introspective album, Behaviour. The Pet Shop Boys drolly claimed Very, and it was billed, all quite tongue in cheek, as their “disco” and/or “anti-rock” album. Indeed, there they are on this first song noticing someone rejected for love because “you dance to disco and you don’t like rock”—although that is also pretty much the last explicit note on the theme for the rest of the album. Very is the last album before slumping down into second-tier levels with Bilingual. But I say all their albums, even Fundamental and Elysium, are generally worth looking into, and please do. However it happened, Very turned out to be not just my favorite Pet Shop Boys album but one of my favorite albums of all time, particularly in the limited early release version that included an extra disc, a dance party EP dubbed Relentless, a raspberry-beret counterpart to the main album’s orange crush. This might be a good place to say I like the colorful, Fear of Music-style textured approach to the album packages almost as much as I don’t like the videos and their dunce cap themes. In the usual mysterious gossipy way, Relentless came to be considered in some circles as “the Chris Lowe album,” suggesting by implication that Very and maybe the other albums are Neil Tennant products. It’s all nonsense, probably a joke propagated by the Pet Shop Boys themselves, but we’ll get to that too. They called this collector’s edition release Very Relentless and I found it was a ride worth taking pretty much on a daily basis for a couple of years, even with grunge crashing and raining down all around me, dutifully listening track by track in sequence order all the way through. Some days, Relentless might lend itself to shuffle. What else can I say to tell you much I loved it and still do? Don’t make me go into the personal events of my life at the time. Let’s just take this thing track by track, in as cool and dispassionate a way as possible.

“Can You Forgive Her?” is the entry point of Very—for what it’s worth, one of their most distinct uses ever of gender-identifying pronouns. Their favorite dodge was a good one, with the singer tending to directly address “you.” But what else is to be done when you’re using the title of a 19th-century novel by Anthony Trollope to claim disco’s ascendancy over rock? (It turned out to be hip hop’s ascendancy, at least in the US, but I think they got the timing right.) The Pet Shop Boys had wanted to make “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing” the first single from the album but the label went for this instead—not sure how it affected the album sequencing, which was increasingly less important in 1993 anyway with CDs and the growing popularity of shuffle. “Go West,” the second single, turned out to be the biggest hit from the album, but “Can You Forgive Her?” did respectably too, reaching #1 in the US on a Billboard Dance Club Songs chart and #10 on a Billboard Alternative Airplay chart (note: the era of splintering senseless categories will never end). I loved “Can You Forgive Her?” just for being the start of the album, but it was also throwing certain darts on target, with interesting rhyme structures: “you’re in love and it feels like shame / because she’s gone and made a fool of you in public again / you’re in love and it feels like pain / because you know there’s too much truth in everything she claims.” You don’t have to be in the closet to make those words resonate although that is basically what the song is about. These lines are offset by one of the surprises of humor on Very in the line about disco and rock—“she's made you some kind of laughing stock / because you dance to disco and you don't like rock”—which still seems funny to me. In fact, humor is one of the secret weapons of this album, notably also seen in “Dreaming of the Queen” and “Go West.” On the Further Listening package, Tennant notes “Can You Forgive Her?” is in 6/8 time, which he says “makes it sneaky. It’s got a sneaky quality to it and that may have inspired some of the words.” “Sneaky” might be exactly right—the whole album sneaked up on me, actually, and this is where it starts. Tennant also notes, “It’s not an autobiographical song. I’ve never been in that situation, and I’ve never had sex behind a bicycle shed.”

"I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing" (1993)

[listen]

The second song on Very comes with one of the most typically wordy yet laconic and very dry Pet Shop Boys titles ever (though perhaps still no match for my personal favorite, "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk"). It was the third single from the album, released late in 1993, and saw a fair amount of success in the US, where it peaked at #2 on the Dance Club Song chart, finishing #8 for all of 1994. In the Further Listening package Neil Tennant says he came up with the song when he spent a day flying to Scotland and back to look at a painting he owned by James Pryde, which he had loaned to a museum. I would not normally do that kind of thing either, having never done anything like it even once. As Tennant points out, it's basically a list song, running through things the singer would not do because, of course, at the moment he is presumably giddy with love and no longer knows himself for the moment. Well, that's love for you all right. Tennant allows himself a humble-brag about the Rite of Spring line: "I feel like taking all my clothes off / Dancing to The Rite of Spring." It's worth bragging about. That line has always jumped out at me, not least because the Stravinsky is one of my favorite pieces of music, so weird, dark, and thrumming. Perfect for this time of year. The Rite of Spring is probably worth dancing to too—it's a ballet, after all—but I remember more often being regularly flattened by awe of it. By comparison, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing" is practically a ditty. But a lovely little pop thing all the same and a nice setup for what's ahead.

"Liberation" (1993)

[listen ... earlier thoughts here]

Silky smooth and all sweet sentiment, "Liberation" probably has to be accounted my favorite song on Very and on my short list of favorite Pet Shop Boys songs too. One of my habits listening to the album included playing it in sequence order but stopping to play this song over a few times before continuing on the daily rounds. I couldn't help myself. It captures exactly the sense of being in love, or maybe just peculiarly my own sense. It felt uncanny the way it could and still can strike a nerve of memory and sensation that rarely dims, although I finally learned I can play it too much. I like the scene depicted in the lyrics: "All the way back home at midnight / You were sleeping on my shoulder ... Take my hand / Don't think of complications." I like the shuffling tempo and light disco touches of the aural setting, the way it soars into the bridge on an aching keyboard/string reprisal of the themes. And I love the idea of the morass of helpless love as liberation. So confounding! Neil Tennant, in notes for the Further Listening package, says the song is "about how, in a way, a relationship is trapping you, but it makes you feel free." That was basically my life situation in 1993, which no doubt accounts for everything, my susceptibility to a song I've seen named by others as the worst on the album. Wrong! Still, "Liberation" was only the fourth of five singles from Very and never did that much, reaching #8 in Finland, #14 in the UK, and missing the charts altogether in the US. Chris Lowe, for his part, seems to see little more in it than its similarities to "Being Boring," from their previous album Behavior (please don't make me actually choose between these two albums). And Tennant has little more to say either, other than that it came together quite easily, with few struggles. He notes some similarities to musical themes in Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet and that's a wrap. "There's nothing more to say about it really," he says.

"A Different Point of View" (1993)

[listen]

"A Different Point of View," the fourth song in the Very sequence and the first not to be released as a single, makes report from the unruly precincts of a new relationship, identifying genders carefully scrubbed as usual. The situation it describes is the sort of yawing back and forth between two people who might be in love, but not yet sure whether they are compatible, or "built for the long haul" in plain speaking. For those listening to the album in sequence, as I usually do, it's the point where it begins to settle into itself as a whole. It is the shortest song on the album after "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing," even though they have two of the longest titles on the album (with "Yesterday, When I Was Mad"). "A Different Point of View" serves as another place for Chris Lowe's soundscapes, which of course is fine. Besides these soundscapes, every track on Very bears feelings of sweet and wounded optimism, the knowledge of pain and love at once. They live on a spectrum of anxiety from butterflies to fear and trembling, the way people living through love affairs experience them. As always, the only thing that matters is love, a signal virtue of the album. At the bridge: "Just say yes / Please," which incidentally contains the titles of their first and 10th albums. So lovely, so felt, so slick—the slickness may well be part of the appeal. Lowe and Tennant are so convincingly urbane, so self-possessed, actually yawning on the cover of their second album. On "A Different Point of View" we begin to discover the interior world of the poser who can't be bothered to cover his mouth.

"Dreaming of the Queen" (1993)

[listen]

Welcome to Very, coming into its own on approximately this track, flattening into shape with an eerie horizon that stretches further and further away. It is like the point in a road trip where you have been driving a few days and your home has started to become more like mere memory. All vestiges of normal life have fallen away. "Dreaming of the Queen" could be the best track here. The album is starting to feel like it's capable of anything now. The song is suffused with wistful sadness—because it is another song about a relationship ending—but it is also comical in surprising ways, drolly recounting a sleeping dream full of dreamlike details: "Diana dried her eyes / And looked surprised / For I was in the nude / The old Queen disapproved." In case you were wondering, yes, "Diana" is Princess Diana, still alive in 1993 and ending her storybook marriage to Prince Charles, and the "Queen" is the Queen of England, Elizabeth II. All these years later, with Princess Diana long dead and the Queen down with COVID, the topicality hardly lands the same way, but really the point is the sad mood of the song and making the dream feel real. The dry account of the dream is largely what makes it, but the music delivers on the pomp and dignity appropriate to the British royal family. "Dreaming of the Queen" is one of the more stately floats in this parade. As the song deepens into its sadness, the utility of the absurd context emerges from the wanton banal cliches: "Love never seems to last, no matter how you try ... there are no more lovers left alive, no one has survived, and that's why love has died, yes, it's true – look, it's happened to me and you." This is not a good dream, however funny we may find this singer taking tea in the nude with the Queen and Lady Di: "I woke up in a sweat / Desolate," he notes. "Dreaming of the Queen" is funny, it's sad, it's absurd, and you never know what's coming next. It's just like a dream.

"Yesterday, When I Was Mad" (1993)

[listen]

The fifth and final single from the big Very Relentless show missed the main US Hot 100 pop chart but did go top 10 in 1994 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart, which has a lot of words. This track feels like a candidate for the everysong of Very, containing all of the other tracks as it is contained by them in turn. In memory I thought the sequencing put it up sooner than sixth track on the album, but here we are. It's got the patented drollery of the title. It operates as a kind of bridge of Very normalcy between two highlights of the album which are very strange, "Dreaming of the Queen" and "The Theatre." Once this "Yesterday" gets wound up it moves at a nimble and brisk pace ("techno techno techno," as Chris Lowe says in notes from the Further Listening edition), breaking open on the chorus. I find that's usually a good place to start singing if I'm going to. The song is about being pouty and/or out of sorts (specifically, on tour and thus often for good reason). I've always read the singer as a hot-tempered but likable fool who appreciates and counts on his forgiving friends. I like the slow / fast herky-jerk start and the way it mixes up time signatures. Those time signatures are because the Pet Shop Boys were nostalgic for progressive rock, according to Neil Tennant in the notes. "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" feels sequenced deliberately to follow "Dreaming of the Queen," wandering randomly for the first minute as if to allow time for recovery from that barrage perhaps. Then the techno busts out about a minute in and the song comes into its own ("techno techno techno"). Ultimately I've always heard the song as about letting go of anger and putting it behind you, delivered in a vaguely self-mocking way—a sort of mental health exercise, Pet Shop Boys single, and "techno techno techno" all at once in a neat 3:55.

"The Theatre" (1993)

[listen]

The lush, the gorgeous, the triumphant, the overdone "The Theatre" bursts with ideas and glory: musical, gestural, production, theatrical (no pun intended, at least not by me). It's fully glamorous and it's also a song about rich people stepping carefully over poor people. It's a high point of the album, though nearly too garish, too weird, too full of itself. It bears a well of molten anger that is deeply buried. It's melancholy, bittersweet—bitter. It's a Dickensian street scene in a theater district nearing show time, lighted wonders of the city after dark, I imagine the St. Petersburg theaters in winter. "The Theatre" sweeps in majestically with a whole battery of sound effects, a crying soul singer, laughing clowns and wheeling harlequins, a puffed-up keyboard-augmented orchestra. Somewhere you can hear the jugglers and the clowns when they all do tricks. It's like the late scenes in The Elephant Man, swirling into the magical other-world of the theater and its transports. But the other world of which the Pet Shop Boys sing appears to turn. It is seen from the view of the "bums you step over ... While you pretend not to notice / All the years we've been here." That is, the song notices not only the glowing electric displays of the theater marquees but also "Loan shark windows / Upon the pavement / Where you wave goodbye." (Or that's the way I hear it. The internet tells me it's "Below shop windows.") The scene is 19th century and Dickensian in its main strokes (though also 20th century and modern), with homeless teenagers lurking in the theater district, hoping for a little more porridge and/or tagging up the walls with graffiti, but more generally ignored at large. One production detail that always sticks with me is the way Sylvia Mason-James is submerged in the mix. She's singing her guts out in best Tina Turner fashion but is entirely subsumed under Neil Tennant's lead vocal and merely coequal to the sections with keyboards and orchestra, part of a three-ring circus providing atmosphere for the main show. At this point in the album, "The Theatre" is just another gaudy pleasure passing by, though one of the grandest floats of them all. Big song. Very big song.

"One and One Make Five" (1993)

[listen]

What I've always liked about this song is the turn of phrase in the title, which at first makes it sound like someone is just dumb or something. But there's a story here, another sad one on an album that features them, about a philandering partner who has just been caught again. I like the compression, proceeding to the inevitable via logic. The singer is adding up the clues, and then comes the flash of understanding, jumping to the number of betrayals it makes, and it's not a trivial number (5). On the album it provides a kind of light palate cleanser after the big stagy production of "The Theatre" and before "To Speak Is a Sin," an equally big production but different in tone. "One and One Make Five" comes across as one of the most frivolous tracks here, relatively short and with gimmicks, except for this sadness, which is experienced in the context of Very almost like a flavor of candy, cherry sadness vs. lemon-lime vs. blue raspberry. I like it—I like everything on the album. But it's a bit overdone in patches ("... giddy-up giddy-up giddy-up ..." etc.) (actually "here we go" but the moral equivalent of "giddy-up"), and it doesn't particularly add up to much. But what am I saying? It's good on relationships and the discussions therein. The singer, the betrayed one, can't believe his beloved homely comforts could be boring and foolish to his partner. The singer is the fool, and he doesn't know it completely quite yet. He is practically learning even as we listen. Thus it is poignant. But the singer also seems callow and smug. It sounds like he won't accommodate anything but his homely comforts. He could even be using them to imprison his partner. We don't know. It is just fragments of a bad relationship passing by.

"To Speak Is a Sin" (1993)

[listen]

I put this song on a mixtape once for a woman I liked. Yes, I did. It's my favorite on the album (or more accurately competes with "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" for the honor). She said it reminded her of Al Stewart, which I hadn't noticed before but she was right. Lucky for me I count him and "Year of the Cat" and Past, Present and Future as good things. I understand this song is often interpreted as the PSBs' AIDS era statement song, and I certainly can hear that when I listen closely to the words. "I always thought it was about sad old lonely homosexuals not daring to talk to anyone attractive in a bar," Chris Lowe said in conversation for notes to the Further Listening edition of Very. Tennant: "Yes, that's pretty much it. And also, when you go into a gay bar ... it's all done by looks and gestures.... We always used to like tragic gay bars." Lowe: "Everyone's too flaming happy now. Obviously it's great that people are happy, but a whole culture has kind of disappeared." I can't speak to any of that. I have never connected to this song exactly that way. To me it's just exquisitely sad, full of nameless regrets and longing, opening at will into appallingly beautiful spaces. It can melt me. Tennant remembers it as "a very slight song" and it is actually one of their first, written in the early '80s. "To Speak Is a Sin" may be simple but it is potent. It seems to be always falling down a little, slipping away, relinquishing. There's a sense of letting go but a much keener one of loss. It feels like you have descended into a place that is at once both comforting and frightening. The burden here is sadness and it is a heavy load. I bear it but it's the one song on the album it took me longest to feel so deeply. It sneaked up on me instead of clobbering me the way "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" did. In the totality of the album, here at the proximate midpoint of the whole Very Relentless package, "To Speak Is a Sin" serves as a bittersweet respite, a slowing down, a meditation. It details the textures of Very in another way, this swirling dreamboat parade float moving down the line. The way Al Stewart did it too, though perhaps never quite with all this lush depth.

"Young Offender" (1993)

[listen]

"Young Offender" comes floating in like a jet airliner landing roaring at a busy airport. The lights are flashing. It's probably night. On the ground, Neil Tennant's (I presume) tilt at petulance in a world where youth is preferred currency is doomed to failure as all such expressions are. Age having a go at youth, as noted by Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange, is never a pretty sight. We are each fated to age and die—aging still the better alternative. But along the way this singer gets off a few good ones, notably "I've been a teenager since before you were born," which remains just right. Or, "I'll put down my book and start falling in love. Or isn't that done?" Otherwise there's not much more to this song. Under the lush packaging and razor wit it's pretty much a ditty. It's better, in fact, when there's no singing and it's just working on its groove. "Young offender, what's your defense?" The words are cutting but we know who's going to win this dispute. The question is whether the older fellow knows he is the vulnerable one or merely believes he is scoring points. Perhaps that knowledge accounts for the faint but distinct melancholy of this song (still a lift from the abyss of "To Speak Is a Sin"). On the fade, "Young Offender" still sounds like an airport but now it's more like 3 a.m. and quiet, much less busy, and the singer might be alone. Perhaps someone was supposed to pick him up and hasn't arrived yet. I imagine traffic on a nearby freeway visible through big airport windows, the white headlights going one direction and the red taillights another. There's always someone else will come along. That's how youth works, and this singer should know it, but maybe he doesn't.

"One in a Million" (1993)

[listen]

Getting close to the finish, things now start to rev up on this track in terms of tempo. "One in a Million" gets up to speed right away in the kickoff and it is real excitement, with a seductive twirling and falling-forward action and a feeling of haunted sadness. The song has roots in Pet Shop Boys material nearly 10 years old. At one time it was considered for a Take That project that never happened. I don't like to say there are weak songs on Very but if there are this would be it (it is absolutely not "Liberation," which I've seen discussed too casually that way). "One in a Million" is safely cloistered in harmless sentimental pop regions, one more gentle empathic song about unrequited love, melting into the Pet Shop Boys coy way of fuzzing up gender. The idea is equal opportunity projection: draw your own conclusions with the fantasy other of your choice. They did this over and over in the '80s and no one seemed to notice. After "To Speak Is a Sin" it's harder for me anyway to hear "One in a Million" as hetero, but their lyrical gender ambiguity stands them in good stead (I admit it took me some time to fully fathom "To Speak Is a Sin"). The focus here is one more poor sap who loves his (her/their) partner more than is returned and that's basically universal. In the days when I played this album constantly "One in a Million" always felt like a brief rest stop between the withering, sophisticated statement of purpose in "Young Offender" and the magnificent "Go West." But stick around if you're trying to save a relationship. This song might speak to you.

"Go West" (1993)

[listen]

The idea that Very is the grand unified statement by the Pet Shop Boys of a pro-disco, anti-rock ethos and way of life is obviously reinforced by finishing off the album on the high note of a cover of the Village People. "Go West" is almost certainly not recognizable to the folks who gyrate to the VP at sports events and political rallies. Even this Pet Shop Boys version was a top 10 hit practically everywhere else but the US (which appears to be eternally stuck at the Young Men's Christian Association figuratively speaking until its citizens can come to terms with what the song is about, if they ever can). This "Go West" is large and in charge—iconic, of course, and wry, double of course, and furthermore exuberantly joyful. The ghost of the Village People as the '70s turned to the '80s and AIDS arrived lurks in the background of this song about moving to San Francisco. Indeed, yearning for liberation broods over the entire album. But the Pet Shop Boys have made this song all theirs, respecting the disco drills and thrills but tarting it up with musical flourishes like a lusty men's chorus and various production tricks already familiar from the foregoing 11 tracks (the soul singer Sylvia Mason-James, for example, dialed down to the mush of the mix where somehow she stands out even more). After a brief overture, "Go West" proceeds directly to the business of the dance song, doing what they are all intended to do at base level, which is get you on your feet and moving. Richard Simmons approves this track, I am certain. It moves and it grooves and then finally it hits an exquisite dance club high point at 4:25. I have always wished they rolled with it from there for the full eight minutes the track lasts or more. Instead, it closes down early, followed by two full minutes of silence (enough time too often to forget the album is still on) and then a snippet of a hidden track sung by Chris Lowe. The 1992 12-inch version of "Go West" (available now in the Further Listening package) is closer to an ideal of a seamless transition into the second album Relentless, which is still sadly the limited property only of early purchasers of the UK release, collectors, and/or ardent fans (not available on streaming but YouTube has it in full). Relentless affords another 37 minutes of dance groove on six more tracks, all in the vein or close to it of the high point in "Go West." The video for the 12-inch version is an interesting mash of US and USSR imagery, making New York City the metaphorical endpoint of the move west, with Mason-James standing in as the Statue of Liberty. Between the cartoony show-biz performance style of the Village People and the beautiful fantasies of liberation in the West (dreams of San Francisco still alive in 1993), the album's big finish is an ecstatically blissful climax to the extended formally informal coming out party of Very: disco, gay, sentimental, and capable of great flights.

"My Head Is Spinning" (1993)

[listen]

And so to the Chris Lowe album—but now wait a minute, is it fair to call the Relentless half of Very the Chris Lowe album? Let's consider some of the clues. I recall loose and unsubstantiated rumors at the time claiming Relentless was "the" Chris Lowe album, largely based on a semipopular notion that Neil Tennant was the lyricist and singer in the ever-enigmatic enterprise, and Lowe, who affected the Harpo Marx style in interviews and public appearances, was the technical wizard at the soundboard with a taste for dance ("because he must be doing something"). The pop melody, arguably the single strongest suit of the Pet Shop Boys, is apparently not considered in this take. Very is certainly a more perfect union of all the instincts of the Pet Shop Boys for pop—with equal doses of irony, romance, melody, and dance mania. It is their great disco screed against rock. The lyrics, often dry and absurd, are among their most memorable, and they had enough dance juice going they turned out a rave concept LP to accompany it. The metadata on my Relentless CD of the original UK release with the extra disc says "Chris Lowe" for composer, an exciting clue. But then Lowe is also listed as the sole composer in the metadata for all three versions I have of the Very album itself: the original US release, the original UK, and the 2001 Further Listening package. I suspect someone has been playing walrus-was-Paul jokes.

In the greater concept (which quite possibly lives only in my own head)—that is, the after-hours dance fever portion—the revelry starts with the last official track on Very, the cover of the Village People's "Go West," cluttered as it is with a hidden track. This hidden track, "Postscript (I Believe in Ecstasy)," is sung by Chris Lowe, as perhaps one more cryptic signal that what follows is the Chris Lowe album, but also setting up the after-hours dance rave concept that follows by striking the themes of ecstasy and faith. "I believe in ecstasy," Lowe says/sings barely above a mumbling tone. And ecstasy is what we will have. "My Head Is Spinning" is not a rip-roaring dance number. It's riding on the currents set in motion toward the end of "Go West" and it knows there's nearly 40 minutes of music and dancing still ahead. Say by way of concept that we have just entered this after-hours rave following a good night elsewhere (ballgame, concert) and in this thought experiment fantasy say that we have also lucked into some good clean variation or other of MDMA walking into the club. And say the first thing we heard was "Go West," which is rousing no matter what your mental condition may be, and you danced very hard in the excitement and pleasure of it, no thoughts just joy captured in the physical moment when the song settles into its groove and then elevates it. "My Head Is Spinning" in this scenario (thus aptly titled) takes almost a full minute to rev up to speed and then it's only a moderate one, powered by a simple bass and systematically building layers of hooks—moderate but insistently insinuating. By the time it breaks open to announce its lyric fragments it's likely you're dancing and responding. Yes, that includes your living room or bedroom. This is the good stuff—Chris Lowe given his full dance DJ head in the studio (or say that's the concept). Around 4:00 the eerie laughter of a theatrical harlequin figure is heard and though it's not entirely a comforting sound—"my head is spinning, my head is spinning," they keep saying—it's a good dance song and there's a lot more of that ahead. It won't stop for a while.

"Forever in Love" (1993)

[listen]

Big whooshy boojie-boy energy heralds the shift from onset and spinning head into love sweet love, no big step in these circumstances. The tempo continues strong with brisk lagging off-kilter stumblebum beats and the mood is sweetened somewhat. It snaps to attention when the anonymous associate director on set with the megaphone calls "Take it from the top" at 2:34. If this is the Chris Lowe album my CD metadata says it is, certainly Neil Tennant is on hand to lend support, vocals, perhaps even words and melodies, heard well here. Except for "One Thing Leads to Another" this might be the most typical Tennant in the Relentless set. Inspirational, recurring verse: "Forever in love / Were you ever in love?" Words to put in your head and ponder as the song swirls forward, falls back, swoops and dives, a whirlwind of beat and emotion (check the moaning dancer: "I feel it, I feel it, I feel it, I feel it, I feel it") making its way back to the question at hand. It's good to dance. Were you ever in love? This is not the only time they will do this, with the questions; gender studies are ahead in the next song but one. But stay in the moment, contemplate this one, simple enough. Were you ever in love? Work it through. Were you ever in love? Grok this. Really it's just more scenery to preoccupy the mind and spinning head in this gentle fantasy of an all-night dance rave, equivalent in meaning to the siren-like sound that elevates it and elevates again. Thoughts are there purely for your entertainment.

"KDX 125" (1993)

[listen]

I was today years old when I learned the KDX125 was a Kawasaki scooter manufactured in the '90s and designed for top speeds on the road, which doubtless accounts for the recurring speed racer sound effects here (echoed on "The Man Who Has Everything," the next track but one). I put off looking up the term—note that the Pet Shop Boys added the space between letters and numbers—because I assumed it was musical gear, kin one way or another (by the use of "DX" maybe) to the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, beloved of A-ha, Phil Collins, Brian Eno, Luther Vandross, and a host of others in the '80s (and loathed by Scott Miller and likely an equally large contingent). Is this the purest Chris Lowe track on the album? Perhaps—first define "Chris Lowe." There's not much obvious input from Neil Tennant, that's one point, and it carries on at max revs the disco four-on-the-floor stomp powering things since approximately "Go West," shading out these various implications of "relentless." Here's where they may be trying hardest on this second act of the show. Is that enough to make it Chris Lowe? It's the third track in the second CD and feels like the place where hard dancing has been set up, put in motion, and now has been going on a while. The mission of "KDX 125" appears to be to prolong: the dancing heat, the sound fury, the stark dynamics of melody and beat, mostly emphasizing beat, reducing down at points to only beat, only bass throb, with generous speed racer sound effects reminding those of us with the knowledge over the past 28 years to get the reference. This is not the point where you're going to sit back. Dance hard, my friend, and drive fast. Dance and drive all night.

"We Came From Outer Space" (1993)

[listen]

At this point, flying out of the relentless stomp of "KDX 125" it is likely not inappropriate to turn to the argot of the hallucinogen family as this, the shortest track in the set (though still over five minutes), may perhaps occur ideally as a peak subsides. As its title suggests, it bears vast space dotted by planets, suns, galaxies, done in keyboard figures, with approximations of celestial choir in due time. More specifically, and literally, it asks the ponderous question, "Do you know the difference between two genders?" And answers, "It came from outer space." Slot that into your headspace and figure it out. There's muttering underneath if you want to roam around in that (per internet, "With the police? / Yes, all / We're, we're just here / What is this? What is that? / – complication high of it –," etc.). The beats are tapered back, more relaxed, even as the mood elevates with the melodies and shifts. The feeling of free-floating zero gravity never entirely goes away. The question and answer and question and answer fade back. It's a good time to rest against the wall and have a drink of water. Staying hydrated is important. It may perhaps deserve to be the shortest song in this set, as it seems uncertain what it wants to do next (though that is also analogous to most immediate post-peak experience). It is somewhat cartoonish with its "outer space" title and rubbery vibe, yet in crowd and party scenes I happen to know the question/answer rarely failed to get attention, for its imponderability as much as anything else. Do you know the difference between two genders? It came from outer space. I knew someone who swore it was evidence of hidden knowledge, though I never quite understood his point. Do you know the difference between two genders? It came from outer space. Drink of water.

"The Man Who Has Everything" (1993)

(listen)

"The Man Who Has Everything" is approximately where Very Relentless takes to its slowdown cooldown in the greater arc of the big show, but it bears a good deal of heat the way objects do on hot days even after sunset, glowing like radiation. The largely instrumental track attacks with long pulling notes on strings and an intensely percolating rhythm. Singers begin to emerge, singing at the top of their lungs but pushed way down in the mix in the style of "The Theater." The words are hard to make out, mindless calls to work it more, work it harder, with a pounding hi-NRG vibe: "Come on, come on, come on, come on / How long will you do some more? How long will you do some more? / You got to you got to – Love Love." At about a minute and a half in it steps up to a familiar Pet Shop Boys play, a shift, a rise, dawning of melody. A silvery portion of heaven and host of keyboards do the functional work of chorus, the place where it returns again, and again. Sing laa-la-la-la-laa, get high on it while it's here. Another 30 seconds, another rise, a new layer of rhythm careening into the fray. Now it feels like speed racer zooming around the track, background images a blur the way manga shows motion but with the main subject as if motionless statue, absolute point of focus, inside this bare fraction of a moment. The bits roll in like waves then, dense substantial ephemeral matter crashing. And again—back and forth, up and down, ascending, racing, crashing. Smooth like glass, glossy reflecting surface, rubbery with bass notes, holding to your head like your favorite hat. It never loses intensity even as it scales down. "The Man Who Has Everything" modulates its six minutes one to the next, impossibly beautiful in unexpected moments, churning and stirring and ending on one last "Love."

"One Thing Leads to Another" (1993)

(listen)

After the explosion of dance fury in "Go West" and Relentless, "One Thing Leads to Another" shambles in amiably enough to finish things off, with assurance and tinkling bells set to a walking pace. We know this Pet Shop Boys play: the ubiquitous bland idiom for title, Neil Tennant nattering his mutter-rappy shtick on the verses (see also "West End Girls"), the magnificent turn to wide vista in the chorus. "And oh my God if you have just discovered / The way that one thing can lead to another / Yeah, oh yeah." It's quite a big moment. What's it about? A story told backwards, they say: in the first verse, if you can make it out (try headphones maybe), a man dies. The things that led to it are covered in subsequent verses. "And the job begins to suffer" is a marker point, but the tone remains matter of fact. Full disclosure, in all my years of infatuation with the Very Relentless package I never picked up on this narrative. It was a YouTube comment what hepped me. What I've known are the sonic pleasures, the layers of sound and stoic beat comforting after the foregoing fray. "Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah" it goes, soothing to sing with even if it loses its way some getting to six minutes. Indeed, we have been seeing earliest glimpses of the Pet Shop Boys as they enter a kind of refurbishing mode, which more and more would dominate their songwriting (though paradoxically with a good deal of range). Here at the end of the feature-length presentation of the combined A and B discs of Very Relentless, "One Thing Leads to Another" works well as a kind of wind-down credits roll. What may be most remarkable of all is arguably beside the point, which is that for once the comments on a YouTube video turned out to be enlightening and interesting.