There used to be a time when anything Pet Shop Boys put out was amazing. That time ended around 1993, and after that they became, sadly, a much more hit and miss kind of band until the point where after the disastrous Release I vowed to never buy a Pet Shop Boys album again without listening to it first.

Love Etc., produced by Xenomania, changed that. It was as if they remembered their lead singles used to be traffic-stoppingly amazing and went “oh! well, perhaps we should do one more then”. And they have. It sounds nothing like any other Pet Shop Boys song, yet it sounds entirely Pet Shop Boys. It’s got a chorus that features call-and-response, male choir (including Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne!), heartbreaking melodies (Neil Tennant’s voice never lost the ability to sound unbearably sad while singing a jolly melody) and those quirky one-liners Neil used to be able to deliver in his sleep — “[you] don’t have to be beautiful, but it helps”.

Love Etc. duly became the biggest hit of 2009 on my chart, restoring PSB to their previous god-like ability to top the chart for ages (six weeks, 29 weeks in total in top thirty) and restoring my faith in them. I went and bought the 2CD special edition of Yes based solely on the amazingness of Love Etc., and while nothing on the album reached those heights of amazingness, I wasn’t disappointed. Perhaps they will never make another Please or Actually, but they can still — if they try hard enough — write a song that I will still want to hear every single day a year after its release.