You'd have to be wearing extremely rosy specs to think the PSBs' second decade was remotely on a par with their first, notwithstanding the excellent singles from '93's Very, which followed their first (peerless) best-of, Discography. And the distinction between "Pop" (17 tracks including "Go West", "It's A Sin", etc) and "Art" (18 tracks including "Rent", the magnificent "Left To My Own Devices", etc) seems spurious: surely the whole point of the Pet Shop Boys is the conflation of the two. The "Mix" CD is grim in parts—half these people (Moby, Sasha, Peter Rauhoffer) shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near a PSB song. Oddly timed, unwieldy and ultimately unsatisfying.

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