Reportedly the last in a trilogy of collaborations with producer Stuart Price, Hotspot is stuffed with instantly infectious melodies and lyrics that flaunt the Pet Shop Boys’s fierce intellect. Eternally sly postmodernists Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are at their funniest here, embedding bouncy synths with barbs directed at failing political institutions across the globe (their own kind of hotspot), social hypocrisies, and even themselves.
The bleeping synth hook of the opening track, “Will-o-the-Wisp,” is the sonic equivalent of mainlining sucrose, and only Tennant would think to use the song’s chorus as an occasion to reference the Vienna U-Bahn metro system. But he’s after something less esoteric and much knottier. A kind of sequel to 1993’s groundbreaking “Can You Forgive Her?,” a song about repressed homosexuality, “Will-o-the-Wisp” finds the narrator running into an old flame on a train and wondering what’s become of him and whether the two will even acknowledge each other. “But maybe you’ve gone respectable/With a wife and job and all that,” Tennant deadpans in a tone of hilarious disdain that suggests no fate could be more horrifying, before delivering the come-on: “Give me a smile for old time’s sake/Before you run away.”
Hotspot consistently points to potential joy amid a backdrop of dread. Over the euphoric house keyboards of “Happy People,” Tennant’s nimble rapped verses (lest we forget that this is the group that launched their career with “West End Girls”) allude to “The sense of so much missing/When the world gets in the way.” Lead single “Dreamland”—featuring Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander, whose own work is indebted to the Pet Shop Boys—might scan at first as romantic four-on-the-floor club filler, but the famously progressive and unflinching Tennant employs the title’s fantastical metaphor to eviscerate the very real leaders who’ve abdicated their countries’ responsibility to take in refugees. “You don’t need a visa,” he sings of an imagined destination. “You can come and go and still be here.”
Not all is (quite) so grim. “You Are the One,” with its sweet yearnings and sticky percussion, ranks among the Pet Shop Boys’s most straightforward love songs, and they’ve rarely sounded more convincing. While they’ve long knocked rock music (Tennant recently joked that the acoustic guitar “should be banned”), “Burning the Heather” adopts the rock textures of 2002’s Release with, um, an acoustic guitar. Autobiographical lyrics describe a fading troubadour who sits in a bar alone insisting that he’s fine before, finally, reaching out for company.
Tennant’s satire can, however, sometimes tend toward glibness, as on “Monkey Business,” in which he vaguely targets a traveler who just wants to get wasted on margaritas and wine. But the track is saved by the irresistible disco production and the darker implications of the unchecked hedonist at its center looking for “a party where we all cross the line.” If the world is burning, the album asserts, you might as well enjoy the bonfire.
The Pet Shop Boys are pranksters to the end, in this case literally. Non-fans would be forgiven for finding closer “Wedding in Berlin” confusing or just grating. But its tragicomic vision of marriage represents a statement of defiance. Church organs interrupt the aggressive EDM beat more like a nightmare than a reprieve. Tennant clearly takes vows less than seriously, reducing them to an act of bourgeois convenience: “A lot of people do it/Don’t matter if they’re straight or gay.” It’s a happily stinging finish to an album that proves no one is safe in the hands of Tennant and Lowe, and that pop can be anything but pedestrian.
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