Guitar power
Marcus Berkmann
Guitars: everyone comes back to them in the end. Even an old rockophobe like me, who feels uncomfortable in the same room as a leather jacket, cannot deny the simple effectiveness of an electric guitar well played. (Or badly played — that often works just as well.) For years the Pet Shop Boys, to name but two, have been poohpoohing the whole notion of guitars, despite employing Johnny Marr to add colour to many of their best records. But then Release (Parlophone) comes along, perfectly on schedule, as the Pet Shop Boys put out a new album every three years, with almost teutonic efficiency. Each new album has a theme of sorts (don't dare call it a concept).
Behaviour, from 1990, was gloomy and full of old analogue synthesisers from the late 1970s (and still sounded wonderful). Very (1993) was pure pop (it had 'Go West' on it). Bilingual (1996) was the not-verygood Latin American album. Nightlife (1999) was the keep-up-with-the-youngones-on-the-dancefloor album, and so much better listened to indoors with a nice cup of tea and a Lincoln biscuit. And Release, it's clear, is the rock 'n' roll album, or as near to rock 'n' roll as Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are ever going to get. Good grief, are those real drums we can hear? No, actually they are computers, but for the first time in Pet Shop Boy history they sound like real drums. Gloria Gaynor, if she were dead, would turn in her grave.
It's all sleight of hand, of course. Tennant and Lowe remain as likely to rock out in squalls of feedback as kin Duncan Smith — probably less so, given the political climate of the moment — and their use of rock dynamics on several tracks is as much for variety as anything else. 'I Get Along', for instance, sounds like Oasis impersonating the Beatles, only with the Gallagher brothers' macho posturing replaced by something much more camp and feline. (Appropriate, really, as the song is about the sacking of Peter Mandelson.) Elsewhere, Marr's guitar sounds almost impossibly warm, but then that has always been Tennant and Lowe's forte: making machine music sound human. And everything, as ever, is in service to the great god Pop, so that much of Release sounds shamelessly of the moment — note use of vocoder on a couple of tracks — while the whole should date as gracefully as their other albums. Not that every song is about disgraced former government ministers. On 'The Night I Fell In Love', a gay teenage boy cops off with famed homophobe Eminem and has the night of his life. Imagine the expression on the face of the real Eminem when he hears of this, and laugh out loud.
But then the Pet Shop Boys will never be to everybody's taste. My two-year-old daughter, whose musical tastes are already remarkably robust, stomped up to the CD player halfway through track six, said, 'This is rubbish,' and pressed the eject button. She much prefers Bryan Ferry's new one, Frantic (Virgin). Ferry too has rediscovered the joy of guitars after a long, long time in the studio overdubbing his overdubs with who knows what. An artist's work rate necessarily slows as he gets older, and not just because daytime TV is so much better than it was, but Ferry has apparently been working pretty much full time for years: it's just that very little of what he writes and records is ever released. But I think he would now agree that after 1985's Boys And Girls he rather lost his way. The albums glowed with production nous, and obviously cost a fortune, but lacked heart and, crucially, killer tunes. His recent covers album As Time Goes By saw a return to a simpler approach; Frantic continues this revival with added oomph. I'm not sure he has made a better record since The Bride Stripped Bare in 1978. There are proper songs here, a mixture of Ferry originals and well-chosen covers, as in the old days, and while this isn't exactly The Strokes, the soup of overdubs has by and large been abandoned. Such is the power of the guitar to revive a flagging career. Next week: whither the saxophone, and is it now time for that glockenspiel revival?
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