Che Guevara and Debussy would both have major problems with Ultimate Pet Shop Boys — and not just because they already shelled out for the Pop Art compilation back in 2006. Che would be upset by the absence of the Boysâ two greatest capitalist satires, âOpportunities (Letâs Make Lots of Money)â and âRentâ. (Donât mess with Che when heâs upset.) Debussy would miss the Tchaikovsky-sampling âAll Over the Worldâ and the kept-woman evocation âRentâ. As for everybody else: did I mention this CD doesnât include âRentâ? What have we done to deserve this?
Now, if you shell out a not-unreasonable sum of money for the Special Edition, which includes two discs of live performances, including a complete set from Glastonbury earlier this year, youâll get all of the above songs and plenty of others you may or may not wanna hear. Look, thereâs âRentâ on Top of the Pops! Crazy smoke machine; it really gets you inside the febrile mind of the kept woman. Of course, if youâre reading this review, you probably already own âRentâ, not to mention âOpportunitiesâ. If not, go buy Pop Art. (The first Pet Shop Boys compilation, Discography, shouldnât be considered in light of its rash decision to exclude âGo Westâ, the Boysâ most heartrending four minutes of bliss — said bliss, after all, is perpetually in the future, somewhere else — ostensibly because it âhadnât been recorded yetâ or something.) As a single disc compilation, Ultimate lives up to that audacious adjective worse than any album in recorded history, with the possible exception of Radio Disney Ultimate Jams, which rashly excluded the A*Teensâ âHalfway Around the Worldâ. Se a vida ĂŠ.
Three of the songs here are new to Pet Shop Boys comps; theyâre not great. âLove etc.â is the best, a swinging capitalist-satire-with-heart that opened last yearâs pretty good album Yes. âIâm with Stupidâ is an â06 political putdown, wise and cheeky about its objectâs stupidity, but not that memorable a tune. âTogetherâ is the shiny new fan-bait; itâs the only Pet Shop Boys song in 3/4 time, and that may be the only interesting thing about it. A pleasant ode to keeping the band together for more than 25 years (no mean feat), it neednât be heard by anyone whoâs not a Pet Shop Boy. Itâs as though, to commemorate their quarter-century in the biz, the Boys wrote each other a waltz. All coworkers should be so lucky.
However redundant, Ultimate Pet Shop Boys still contains eight or nine bounce-off-the-walls, think-about-life, luxuriate-in-sound great songs. The most recent is the warm âHome and Dryâ, which opened 2002âs grownup album Release with a guitar figure not unlike Puff Daddyâs âIâll Be Missing Youâ. From the get-go, the Pet Shop Boys have been masters of creating vivid pop arrangements that allow every element its say, whether itâs the technicolor piano figure of âSuburbiaâ or the droney synth-didgeridoo — which I only just noticed — in âWhere the Streets Have No Nameâ. French horns seem to pop up everywhere. While their synthpop peers Erasure needed a couple years to concoct a full sound, Pet Shop Boys seemed to hit the ground running with the dogs.