Yes: Further Listening 2008-2010 (Deluxe Edition) [2017 Remaster]

Some bands, as they age, turn into hacks, banging out songs that mean nothing to them; some lose it by becoming dilettantes, groping at modish styles they don't understand. But it takes a master ironist to fall into mediocrity by embracing sincerity and scoffing at dancefloor trends-- and Pet Shop Boys' frontman Neil Tennant has built his career out of being a master ironist. That, it turns out, is why the band's 10th studio album is such a disappointment.

On its surface, Yes isn't a significant departure from the style of the PSBs' better records--the same highbrow witticisms ("Love etc" is probably the first U.K. chart single to namedrop artist Gerhard Richter), the same lavish arrangements, Tennant's soft little voice cutting through the beats. It allegedly features the duo's longtime collaborator Johnny Marr playing on a few tracks, although most of the guitar parts are bland as paste or all but inaudible or both. But the Boys have apparently forgotten the great joke of their hits' production--that Tennant, despite having one of the least robust male voices in pop history, had somehow ended up singing on disco records--and the high concept of their public persona: that Tennant put up an impressive front of arch, campy boredom to protect the tenderest of hearts. To put it another way, the brilliance of their cover of "Always On My Mind" was that they surrounded it with a few dozen sets of ironic quotation marks, that they were formally unequipped to support it in the manner to which it was accustomed, and that they meant it anyway.

Here, though, Tennant slaps his heart on his sleeve and gets on with things. The result isn't awful, although none of it is as spooky and playful as the cover of the Passions "I'm In Love With a German Film Star" that the Boys produced for Sam Taylor-Wood last year. Yes has a few flashes of Tennant's old wit, especially "All Over the World", which lifts its biggest hook from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker March and describes itself as "sincere and subjective... superficial and true." "King of Rome" gets points for rhyming "I couldn't be more lonely" with "someday you'll deign to phone me."

On the other hand, "Love etc" and "Beautiful People" are good arguments for an immediate moratorium on wealthy pop stars writing songs about how materialism is overrated and "love is for free" and it's stupid to "buy the latest magazine and aspire to the dream." (You're living some version of the dream, guys.) And "Building a Wall" seems to be some kind of international-relations-as-personal-relations metaphor, but doesn't take the conceit anywhere: Having come up with a solid opening line for the chorus, Tennant simply repeats it.

The big source of stagnation here, though, is the music. Tennant and other-guy-in-the-band Chris Lowe made their reputation on paying attention to what was happening in dance clubs and hitching their wit and pop-sense to it, which is how they ended up collaborating with the likes of Bobby Orlando and Frankie Knuckles and Shep Pettibone in the 1980s. Yes, though, was produced by Xenomania, the pop chop-shop behind Girls Aloud's singles, leaving the Boys lagging a few years behind the sound of the UK charts when they used to be ahead of the game or at least above the fray. "Pandemonium" recapitulates the 6/8 lope and major/minor switcheroo of their own 1993 single "Can You Forgive Her?" The up-with-persons anthem "More Than a Dream", co-written by Xenomania, just sounds like a Girls Aloud discard. And the cryptic, bombastic slow one that ends Yes, "Legacy", circles around the phrase "you'll get over it". It's hard to tell if that's a tongue-in-cheek valediction, or if it's just Tennant and Lowe resigning themselves to disappointment.