Album Review: Pet Shop Boys - Electric

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe wanted to make a dance record, and wow, did they what. Electric could have come out as the musical equivalent of your dad rocking a Hawaiian shirt at your 21st birthday. Instead, it sits as a pinnacle of their career, beating to the pulse of house music's resurgence, marrying it with their trademark synth pop, while still offering elements of darkness and depravity across it all.

Throughout Electric you're constantly spun-out at how attuned these fifty-year-old blokes are to current electronic trends. If they ever make a sequel to the Ryan Gosling-led bloodbath Drive, Axis is built to soundtrack the movie's opening scene. Fluorescent pounds up and down like a push-up, Inside A Dream works on minimalism and space, The Last To Die, meanwhile, anchors on a keyboard riff early before riding the ebb and flow of the washy synths and layered chorus – Pet Shop Boys working magic on what's incredibly a Bruce Springsteen original from the rocker's 2007 album, Magic. Even when they get a bit West End Girls, like on Love Is A Bourgeois Construct, they do so without glancing over their shoulders once. Vocal closes the record massively, the track a giant celebration and summary of what this LP represents.

At many points on Electric you find yourself going, 'Oh, that's a nod to Scissor Sisters', 'There's some Simian Mobile Disco in that'. But then you realise that these two Brits long preceded any such modern acts. Pet Shop Boys are the originators of glamorous, pulsing disco sleaze, and they've all but reminded the new school who designed the curriculum in the first place.