Album reviews: Pet Shop Boys | Twin Atlantic | Eminem

There’s a spry freshness as much as a comforting familiarity to the latest album from the Pet Shop Boys, writes Fiona Shepherd

Pet Shop Boys

Pet Shop Boys: Hotspot (x2) *** 


Twin Atlantic: Power (Virgin EMI) **


Eminem: Music to Be Murdered By (Shady/Aftermath) ***



Like a synth-driven Ramones, Pet Shop Boys have now entered their fifth decade of producing the-same-but-different sound, whether writing songs for the Fringe hit Muzik and Hanif Kureishi’s stage production of My Beautiful Launderette or their own albums of wry party pop and wistful electro contemplation.


Once again, there is a spry freshness as much as a comforting familiarity to their 14th studio album. Hotspot is billed as the last of a trilogy produced by Stuart Price, a kindred spirit of synth pop, and there is further continuity in electing once again to write and record in Berlin, one of the world’s great artistic cities.


Berlin is the setting for the dreamy odyssey You are the One, while the throbbing techno mantra Wedding in Berlin is a semi-satirical catalogue of marital platitudes. There’s a nod to Germany’s most influential musical export (and we’re not talking Boney M) on Happy People, which recalls Kraftwerk in its precise, sonorous synth lines before they set off on a Euro expedition with an outbreak of Italian piano house circa 1990 and a signature spoken word narrative from Neil Tennant. Nothing we haven’t heard before yet delivered with a playful finesse.


Dreamland takes its lead from the pomp synths of their own It’s a Sin, then dovetails into a frothy confection which could have been produced in the German and Dutch disco pop factories of the 70s. This duet with the similarly reedy Olly Alexander of Years and Years is a classic call for escapism and much of the album follows in that disco tradition.


I Don’t Wanna is a carefree club track about not wanting to hit the dancefloor but Tennant and keyboard compadre Chris Lowe have shrugged off their reluctance by the time they get to Monkey Business, a hedonistic cocktail of bubblegum electronica, climactic disco strings and Tennant’s knowingly rubbish attempts at rap.


The one track recorded outside Berlin – at RAK Studios in London with guest guitarist Bernard Butler – is a different prospect. Burning the Heather is a leisurely, bucolic vignette featuring such lyrical nuggets as “sheepdogs are running hell-for-leather” and “I’m not one of those breadheads, always pounds, shillings and pencing” delivered in Tennant’s unmistakeable deadpan tones, which shows that they can still throw a curveball when they fancy.


Glasgow’s Twin Atlantic return as a trimmed-down trio on a new label with a new style to the window-dressing around their commercial Scot pop rock sound. There are shades of their countrymen Gun on the slick electro rock of Oh! Euphoria! and of Chvrches on the pumping electro pop/rock of Novocaine. They come to life like a latterday Simple Minds on turbo-charged and snake-hipped I Feel It Too and are open about the influence of Depeche Mode on the moody, mid-paced electro pop of Ultraviolet Truth and the portentous Messiah, all of which may translate happily to their forthcoming set at TRNSMT but makes for derivative home listening.


Eminem’s 11th album has landed without warning, kicking off with the Alfred Hitchcock sample which gives the album its name. Music to Be Murdered By is hip-hop’s answer to the murder ballad, namechecking notorious figures from John Wilkes Booth to Osama Bin Laden and generally following the perpetrator’s point of view, from the disturbing planned patricide of Stepdad to the sinister single Darkness, which threads a mournful musical reference to Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence through a bleak chronicle of the 2017 Las Vegas shootings. There is light relief from guest Ed Sheeran trying to keep up with a buzzing Eminem on Those Kinda Nights and the breakneck fuzz punk fun of Yah Yah, plus expert changes of pitch and pace, from the wired Little Window to the low-slung Lock It Up with Anderson Paak. Fiona Shepherd



CLASSICAL

NDR Radiophilharmonie: Beethoven Symphonies 5 & 7 (Pentatone) ****


There will be many Beethoven recordings this year as the musical world celebrates the 250th anniversary of his birth, and the first to arrive is this sprightly and perceptive coupling of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies by Andrew Manze and the NDR Radiophilharmonie.


It’s only weeks since Manze performed the famous Fifth live with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. This is a more surefooted performance, energised and graceful, bombastic and refined – in other words embracing the forceful, expressive ambiguity of the piece, yet also its singular, triumphant goal.


In contrast, his interpretation of the Seventh opens with accommodating expansiveness, prior to the breezy optimism of the Vivace, the infinite invention and arclike inevitability of the Allegretto variations, the incessant chatter of the Scherzo and headlong ecstasy of the Finale. Ken Walton



JAZZ


Mezcla: Shoot the Moon (Ubuntu Music) *****


The young Glasgow jazz fusion band Mezcla have been making a name for themselves and this debut album firmly bolsters their reputation. They boast three award-winners – not least their leader, bassist David Bowden (BBC Young Scottish Jazz Musician 2017), plus Glasgow-based veteran LA percussionist Steve Forman. The title track is an exuberant eruption of drums and fanfaring horns, Michael Butcher’s tenor sax and Alan Benzie’s keyboard riding Bowden’s funky Latin groove, while there’s beefy township bounce to the joyful Sami’s Tune, with incisive breaks from guitarist Ben MacDonald and trumpeter Joshua Elcock.


Dinosaur Jump is suitably muscular over a stalking bass line, while Stephen Henderson’s drums cut loose in Knockan Crag, but there’s also a penchant for melody, as in Auckland Hill, languid and folkish, with mellow duetting horns, glistening keyboard and an eloquent guitar foray as it gathers pace and weight. Jim Gilchrist