A Film Canon

This is a curious album, frequently moving from the sublime to the ridiculous in the space of a single song. At its strongest, it successfully fuses two disparate, even inimical, sensibilities - Liza's overwhelmingly personal register, which transforms any utterance, however ostensibly impersonal, into a confession of divaesque proportions; and the Pet Shop Boys' (who produced the album, and wrote seven of its ten tracks) taste for playful obliquity, which ensures that, even at his most confessional, lead singer Neil Tennant either appears to be singing about someone else, or about a version of himself from which he now enjoys a melancholy detachment. As might be expected, this combination works best on the five songs written specifically for Liza - especially the epic "If There Was Love", in which the intermittent lyrical concessions to this divaesque grandeur ("I've been working for a long time/Scattering smiles/Must I swallow my pride?") are curbed by the wryer, impersonal verses ("Banks have predictions, Policies made/Prophecies broken, violence deranged"), culminating with an unexpected spoken word segment, in which Liza reaches Shakespearean heights, but only to be gradually drowned out by the sublime synth arrangement. Unfortunately, her two covers of Pet Shop Boys songs ("Rent" and "Tonight Is Forever") are more in the way of a transformation than of a compromise between their respective registers, although orchestrator Angelo Badalamenti's flourish at the beginning of the latter provides a momentary promise to draw out the original's melancholy potential.