Release

1	Home and Dry 4:21
2	I Get Along 5:49
3	Birthday Boy 6:26
4	London 3:46
5	E-Mail 3:55
6	The Samurai in Autumn 4:17
7	Love Is a Catastrophe 4:50
8	Here 3:15
9	The Night I Fell in Love 5:04
10	You Choose 3:10

Barnes & Noble

Like Tears for Fears and New Order, the Pet Shop Boys have essentially evolved into a community oldies band for those enamored of mid-'80s British synth-based pop-rock and the giddy dread and detached poses of urban living. But as both the Boys and their fan base have grown older, everyone seems to want Pet Shop tales that are more adult and less frivolous. Release, the Boys' eighth album, serves up adulthood in a straight-ahead guise -- on the chords of an omnipresent acoustic guitar and via commentary from narrators looking at the world through a single window. Assisted once again by former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe move closer to reflecting folk-rock singer-songwriter musings, documenting what they know for sighs, not laughs, with stylistic singularity. There are exceptions. "London" harks back to classic PSB of cheap synths and simple melodies as it tells a story of Eastern European refugees. "The Samurai in Autumn" is an electro-trance groove with an ageist haiku for a lyric. And "Here" is straight-up old-skool synth-pop, with Tennant taking a moment to focus on the safe places of life in the way, say, the Flaming Lips do, not so much outlining a bowl of cherries as declaring that regardless of one's state, something sweet is always there. The limited-edition version of Release includes a bonus CD with nine tracks and an enhanced video for "Home and Dry." Piotr Orlov

All Music Guide

The Pet Shop Boys have never made a bad album, but with Nightlife, they started to seem a little worn out, as if they had explored their sound as far as it would go. But Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are among the smartest, pop-savvy groups to ever record, so they not only realized they were stagnating, they knew what to do about it, bringing Tennant's Electronic partner and former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr for several songs, and moving the group toward careful, considered, mature pop for their eighth album, Release (another pun-worth title, worthy of Please). For most artists, the adjective "mature" would seem an epithet, but here it's an accurate description for this elegant, eloquent, knowing music -- it's maturation achieved through experience and worldliness, not an exorbitant bank account. On that level, this is about the most mature pop album released this decade, exhibiting a refined sense of craft and a keen sense of purpose, marrying the particular sentiment of a song with the right production. It's hard to call Release an album of its time, since it hardly falls prey to trends, but it's aware of its time -- an album that's proudly out of step with the particulars of hipness, but knows what they constitute, knows what they feel like, knows what modernism means for somebody who's lived their life with the burden of being hip, whose always felt a compulsion to stay on top of things -- and feeling that desire fade as you get older. So, that means that while Release occasionally sings of the new -- synth lines, vocoders, beats, a song designed to respond to Eminem's homophobia (the exquisite "The Night I Fell in Love") -- it's from the vantage of people who have lived through all of this before, and know particulars will pass while the song remains the same. The great thing is, even if this sentiment has been present in previous Pet Shop Boys albums, they have brought the dance-club to the background (partially due to Marr's presence) and have brought the songs to the forefront, resulting in a record that feels like the Pet Shop Boys, even when it doesn't sound like them. And that's a good thing, since it retains their greatest attributes while giving them a new spin, and it makes for the best Pet Shop Boys album in nearly ten years. Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Village Voice

The Eminem track is . . . wondrous, transcendent, a blow against rap homophobia, a great work of art. [B+] Robert Christgau