Album Review: Pet Shop Boys - Elysium

The Pet Shop Boys' 11th album Elysium offers 12 tracks wrapped up in blissed-out Balearic disco dreaminess. Recalling their glory days, much of this album sounds like it could have been the follow-up to Behaviour as the duo bring in the vintage synths and apply the formula that made them famous in the first place.

Like a time machine, everything about this album takes us back to the '80s, but Tennant's deeply reflective lyrics are very much about the here-and-now of their lives. Invisible eloquently talks about growing old in a youth-obsessed culture and is at once about being a single gay man in his 50s as much as it is about the Boys' capacity to splash their tunes on the charts. It seems surprising that Tennant at this stage of his career sounds despairing that the party's almost over. Doesn't every pop star expect that once the tweens have bounced them up and down the charts, eventually they will move onto the next big thing when the shtick you are peddling becomes predictable?

Your Early Stuff reflects on the past with wit while Ego Music is stupidly bitter and twisted. Clouds of shimmering strings on Breathing Space wistfully tug at the heart strings. Eulogising make-up artist Lynne Easton over a disco beat, Requiem In Denim And Leopardskin is perhaps the the best song the Boys have written in ages. Its unbridled nostalgia yearns for the exciting and vibrant times that were the early-'80s. As the title Elysium suggests, this is an almost heavenly album.