On May 22 peace and joy will reign in the land, because the Pet Shop Boys will release their first record in over four years! Fundamental returns to their dance/disco/techno roots; if it returns to their narrative irony roots, all the better -- not that their John Cheever period (comprising 1999's Nightlife and 2002's Release) has been at all unrewarding, but songs like "Hit Music" and "Rent" and "So Hard" are Sondheim-worthy. Go listen to the first single, called "I'm With Stupid," at their website, cunningly called petshopboys.co.uk. (Hit the blinking button to enter the site -- I don't know why you have to hit the blinking button to enter the site -- and give it a minute to load.) I suspect Fundamental will be one of them-there transitional records, like Behaviour. But I'm still nuts about Behaviour.
I didn't like Kathleen Edwards's "Back to Me" at first, but after a few more listens, I've now worked my way up to "I wish I liked it better." If you don't know that song by its title, you might know it as "Ways," since nearly every line starts with "I've got ways of..." That's a mistake: it's not cleverer to call a song something other than what everyone will call it anyway. But a lot of the lines sneak up on you -- especially the last line of the chorus, where it's just possible all her ways don't amount to a hill of beans. I'd have made the two lines before that rhyme, though; it would have been more obsessive -- maybe she thought the chord change would carry it, which admittedly is a common error. Mainly Edwards reminds me how great Rosanne Cash is.
The other day I realized that Chicago IX, the best-of which more or less sums up the Terry Kath era, doesn't include either of the big hits from Chicago VIII ("Harry Truman" and "Old Days") because Chicago VIII was still in record stores at the time. Which is really lame, but in the Napster era it's an easily-rectified problem. I guess a proper Terry Kath sum would include bigger slabs of the two-disc Chicago VII (except for the ballad, Kath owns side three), the 1977 hit "Baby What a Big Surprise" which preceded his death, and even the godfather of all their '80s prom themes, "If You Leave Me Now," although Kath does not actually play on it (producer Jim Guercio plucks acoustic guitar; I'd say Terry Kath must have hated the song, but Kath rarely played acoustic guitar on Chicago songs). Here's a lyrical oddity, though: on "Old Days," Peter Cetera expresses nostalgia for things that have not disappeared from the pop culture landscape at the time of its recording. One almost wonders if that's supposed to be irony, but I'd definitely put that past Chicago.
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