Wednesday, April 1, 2009

It's better than nothing, I suppose



188. Pet Shop Boys - "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk" (Parlophone, 2000)

The Pet Shop Boys have had such an amazing career making great pop songs that it's hard to choose a favorite, even with science on your side. But if I had to (which I don't, but whatevs), I would probably go with this beauty. Neil Tennant's lyric about a partner who needs booze to say the three magic words is, well, it's just so wonderfully specific, isn't it? Longtime readers/friends will point out that any song about booze automatically gets extra points from me and, well, that may be true, but very few songs about booze or anything else are this witty and charming. Neil even manages to pull off the lyric "you should be kissing him instead of dissing him like a punk" and sound perfectly reasonable!

The arrangement is way over the top, especially considering the somewhat quirky lyric, and it's awesome. There's an orchestra, steel guitar, acoustic guitar, plenty of synths, and they all go up, up, and away at the end. Wonderful work, all involved, keep crankin' em out.

(embedding on the actual video is disabled, but that just means I get to post Top of the Pops lip syncing)

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