Pet Shop Boys: 'Yes'

The tenth Pet Shop Boys album isn't a work of wrist-slitting misery. You can work that much out from its bold, bright cover art, which displays a large multicoloured tick against a plain white background, and that simple, affirmative title. Neil Tennant, meanwhile, has been talking up the record's fundamental positivity in interviews. "For this album we wrote so many poppy, "up" kind of songs," he told DS recently, "that we thought it would be perfect if Xenomania wanted to get involved."

He's not being misleading - at Yes's heart is a clutch of utterly joyous pop songs: the Tchaikovsky-sampling 'All Over The World', the slightly delirious 'Pandemonium', 'More Than A Dream' with its arms-in-the-air chorus, a giddy love song called 'Did You See Me Coming?' Thankfully, collaborating with Xenomania, the pop production house behind hits from Girls Aloud and Alesha Dixon, hasn't goaded the Pets into trying anything undignified. Yes sounds clean, fresh and contemporary - as lead single 'Love etc.' had suggested - but it never tries to get down with the kids. Nothing here, you'll be glad to know, sounds like an electronic version of 'The Boy Does Nothing' or a middle-aged take on 'Love Machine'.

But of course, this being a Pet Shop Boys album, there's more to Yes than joyous pop songs. 'King of Rome' is an exquisite tale of post-break-up loneliness, while 'The Way We Used To Be', perhaps the album's standout track, is about a once brilliant love that disintegrates over time. Yes is also a good deal smarter than the average pop album, with 'Love etc.' namechecking trendy German artist Gerhard Richter, 'Pandemonium' sending up the Kate Moss/Pete Doherty romance, and 'Legacy' offering a quietly scathing analysis of the Blair years. "Public opinion may not be on your side," Tennant sings, deadpan as ever. "There are those that feel they've been taken for a ride."

Yes isn't perfect - epic closer 'Legacy' could do with some pruning, one or two other tracks are a bit on the ordinary side - but these quibbles melt away when answering the big questions. Does the union of Pet Shop Boys and Xenomania work as well on record as it does on paper? Are Tennant and Lowe, now in their 25th year as a hit-making duo, relevant in today's musical landscape? Will lapsed fans who enjoyed their triumphant performance at last month's Brit Awards find plenty to enjoy here? For the answer to all those questions, you need only glance at the album cover.


> Click here to read our Pet Shop Boys interview