Beqach Boys

The Pet Shop Boys' collaboration with playwright Jonathan Harvey for Closer to Heaven was a smashing success among the West End in 2001 and a delight for fans around the world. The original cast recording matched the musical's campy appeal and made the Pet Shop Boys accessible again, but on a theatrical scope that's chased their sound for decades. Closer to Heaven is vibrant and brash with lush pop decadence, but also a brazen tale of sex and drugs. What's more inviting is how the overall soundscape is uninhibited. Billie Trix, who's played by Frances Barber, is a vocal vixen. "My Night" is an infectious disco romp, but she sets the mood with the angelically sassy "Friendly Fire." The Pet Shop Boys' own "Vampires" and "Closer to Heaven" from 1999's Nightlife are recast; however, the sheer duet between characters Vic and Shell on "In Denial" shimmies with Hi-NRG breakbeats for something cheeky, yet sensitive…

20-tracks, Japan only Greatest Hits, released in 1991 by Toshiba-EMI Ltd.. Includes 26-page b/w booklet with pics and lyrics in English and Japanese.

Nightlife is a loose concept album – more of a song cycle, really – about nightlife (naturally), a collection of moods and themes, from love to loneliness. In that sense, it's not that different from most Pet Shop Boys albums, and, musically, the album is very much of a piece with Very and Bilingual, which is to say that it relies more on craft than on innovation…

Something to remember while listening to the 2020 anthology Beastie Boys Music is that the band never knew what they were doing exactly—they had ideas but not really a plan. At least, not evidently. Listening to Music, the impression is of a band in a state of restless experimentation, true to themselves but so dilated and available to what the world had to offer that they couldn’t stay in place for long. They were magpies, and in their continuous absorption—new and old, white and black, cool and cool-in-waiting—they not only redrew boundaries between hip-hop, pop, and rock, but anticipated a culture in which stewing together your disparate interests could be a gesture of creativity in and of itself.