 |
02/06 Verizon Wireless Theatre, Houston Pet
Shop Boys don't knock 'em dead It's unclear which faction of their fan base the Pet Shop Boys were trying to reach on Sunday at the Verizon Wireless Theater. More clear was who they weren't catering to. Touring in support of the new album Release, Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe offered a 20-song set that was neither a retrospective of hits nor a celebration of the group's beat-heavy dance anthems.
No problem with these treasured favorites. The rest of the night drew from Release and some of the Pet Shop Boys' more ethereal ballads. If it had been an acoustic show, that might have been appropriate, but the approximately 2,100 people in this theater wanted to dance. Tennant and Howe have grown from young mods to stately gents over their 20-year career. Taking the stage alongside a four-man live band of strings and percussion, Lowe still hid under one of the long-brimmed baseball-style caps the band wore on the cover of 1995's Alternative album. Tennant looked more comfortable with his salt-and-pepper hair. His boyish tenor and dainty English accent are studio-perfect, and he looked debonair in loose-fitting dark clothes. Home and Dry was an optimistic first glance at the latest album. The unforced beat and delicately rolling melody were reminiscent of effortless early hits. The rest of Release was not nearly as strong and ever-present. I Get Along was early rock 'n' roll with acoustic verses and a Hey Jude sing-along chorus. It sounded like something Oasis' Gallagher brothers could have come up with on a MTV Unplugged show. Others, like London and Sexy Northerner, relied on concert-friendly guitar and voice manipulation, but still felt like not quite completed ideas. Supporting a new album is a good idea, but at some point a band must realize that the new music isn't on the radio, and ticketholders just want to hear the hits. The Pet Shop Boys may well be at this juncture. Clearly the high points for both old fans and young club admirers were the joyous plunges into strobe lights and smoke machines for Always on My Mind and West End Girls. These climaxes were too few and far-between. At one never-ending midpoint, the Pet Shoppers played seven slow songs in a row. Tennant and Lowe seemed about to redeem themselves with a hit-heavy encore of Left to My Own Devices and It's a Sin. Just as a good sweat began to form, however, they closed -- with the unwelcome new song You Choose. Many
in the crowd had hit the door to go dance elsewhere before the final
note was even struck. |
One-third
of the 100-minute show was dedicated to first-decade hits like West
End Girls and Love Comes Quickly, synthesized early-'80s pop hits
from the group's halcyon days as radio standards. Then came uptempo
remakes of Village People's Go West and U2's Where the Streets Have
No Name. 
