When the Pet Shop Boys made their appearance at the closing ceremonies for this year's Olympics, they were as marvelous as they've ever been, in their spectacle-that-punctures-the-spectacle way: a reliable part of the English firmament, like a more tuneful Gilbert & George in better outfits. They were trotting out a truncated bit of "West End Girls", now 28 years old, whilst on the cusp of releasing their eleventh studio album, Elysium. The videos for new songs "Invisible" and "Winner", are elegantly conceived and executed, and so is the packaging associated with the record and its singles. They have all the design sensibility anyone could want in a pop act. If only they'd put the same vigor and power into their new songs, they might be on to something.
As always, the Pet Shop Boys' latest studio LP has a resonant single-word title. "Elysium" is a reference to Elysian Park, near where they recorded the album in Los Angeles, but it's also a high-class sort of word for paradise, in the specific sense of the afterworld of the blessed. The implication is that, somewhere in there, Pet Shop Boys slipped into the great beyond, and Neil Tennant is now singing to us from the other side. But Tennant and Chris Lowe's relationship to pop and its audience has changed over time, and not in a loss-and-beatification way. For Pet Shop Boys' first decade or so, they were impostors so studious and inspired that they were better than the real thing. Now they've settled into being elder statesmen of pop at a time when pop has little use for elder statesmen, and they're off-puttingly bitter about it.
Their self-consciousness is overtly the subject of Elysium's two worst songs: "Your Early Stuff", whose title gives away its only good joke, and "Ego Music", a slapdown of fake-humble stars ("There's a real purity to my work, a childish innocence...") that's a diluted variation on the theme of 1993's "Shameless". And it keeps coming up in Tennant's lyrics, one way or another. "It's queer how gradually I've become invisible," he croons: That's most obviously a commentary on being a gay man in his 50s, but it's hard to miss the suggestion that he's talking about his position on the charts.
Lowe has suggested that he'd have preferred there to be "no fast songs at all" on this record, and the quietest songs on Elysium are generally the best, especially the heart-on-sleeve "Memory of the Future". (There's one full-on dance track here, "A Face Like That", whose fake-orchestral stabs and strobing single-note synth bass make it sound like an outtake from the Actually era, but its melody is instantly forgettable.) Tennant's mature gift as a lyricist is for sentimentality tempered by slyness, and he pulls that off a few times: "Ossie's last collection/ Biba's closing sale/ A little more rouge on powdered cheeks/ But the base is pale," he sings in "Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin", an elegant tribute to the late makeup artist Lynne Easton that's also a tender remembrance of the London of Pet Shop Boys' prehistory. (It's no "Being Boring", but one can only write "Being Boring" once.)
Too much of Elysium, though, misplaces its subtlety. There's no suggestion that "Hold On"--adapted from a piece by George Frideric Handel-- is anything more than a vaguely inspirational lighter-waver, for instance, and the arrangement's alternating male and female choirs are corn syrup poured on cotton candy. Is there some covert archness to it, some enormous conical hat peeking out from behind its bromides and bombast? Or does Tennant and Lowe's vision of paradise really consist of unpunctured spectacle?
