Friday 30 August 2013

Unforunate events and new Pet Shop Boys songs.

Afternoon all, it's been an unforunate two days. There was a bad car accident yesterday just opposite the family business. The driver of the vehicle was killed - he had an apparent heart attack at the wheel and lost control, crashing into pedestrians in the process. An awful event indeed. I can't even begin to imagine the pain his family and friends are going through right now. Simply heartbreaking. They're very much in my thoughts. Incidentally, today also marks the 10th anniversary of the death of my grandfather, whom I was very close to. It's also been announced today that the famed Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney has passed away too. Very sad news - I studied his poem Mid Term Break as part of my GCSE English coursework. It was one of the favourite pieces of poetry I studied, and it moved me an awful lot. I just hope this marks the end of the unfortunate series of events here in Northern Ireland.

On a slightly lighter note, Pet Shop Boys have unveiled snippets of the two upcoming Love Is A Bourgeois Construct b-sides! The two digital bundles (including the B-sides) will be released on September 2nd. Both tracks are dance songs, very much continuing on with the overall sound of Electric. They're definitely more experimental in style though, I don't think they could have fitted on the album.To be honest, both songs share more similarities with each other than they do with Electric's songs I think. Anyway, here's a brief breakdown of my initial thoughts below.

Entschuldigung
Well, this most certainly has a pulsating arrangement. It's a very hard dance track. To be honest, I'm struggling to think of a harsher dance track in Pet Shop Boys history. It doesn't sound all that dissimilar to the legendary German group Kraftwerk. Very appropriate too, considering the title of the song is German for "sorry" and the lyrical content. The song is essentially Pet Shop Boys apologizing to German fans, because despite frequenting Germany often they are unable to speak German. As you could imagine, German phrases are abundant in Entschuldigung. There's not a hint of English to be found in the sample (nor Neil or Chris' voices either). I'm totally illiterate in German myself, so I can't offer anything in the way of a translation. At 5:02 in length though, it's the longer of the two B-sides.

Get It Online. 
Still a dance track, but less harsh sounding. Get It Online is very retro in sound actually - and in my opinion it sounds even more like a Kraftwerk song than Enshuldigung. Get It Online also contains a number of foreign phrases too, although again I can't translate any of them. English does feature this time though. Also, so does Chris - I'm fairly sure that's him singing "whatever I want, whatever I want, I can get it online" through a vocodder. At least if it's not, it sure as hell sounds an awful lot like him. Also it seems like my initial theories that the lyrics would discuss illegal downloading have been thwarted. You can hear samples of people saying "proceed to checkout!" which - coupled along with the line quoted earlier - seems to suggest it's more about the dominance of internet culture. How it's now an integral part of our daily lives, and let's be honest: what can't you do on the internet? It's also a rather short 3:36 in length. That may not be no bad thing though because it does sound like it contains minimal lyrics. I could see this being a Chris Lowe track actually - there's no hint of Neil Tennant in that sample at all.

So - that's my brief thoughts on both tracks. Very tenative I know, and subject to change.I like both songs so far, although my favourite would be Get It Online at this point. Both songs stylistically aren't that far removed from one another really. I don't know when the tracks were recording, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were recorded around the same time. Of course, we won't know that for sure just yet. In any case, I'm looking forward to hearing them in full!

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