Pet Shop Boys: «Very» альбомы және жаңа бағыттары

Very is the fifth studio album by English synth pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released on 27 September 1993 by Parlophone, nearly three years after the duo's previous studio album, Behaviour, and following the compilation album Discography: The Complete Singles Collection. Very exhibits one of many turning points the Pet Shop Boys would make to their music, shifting from the subdued electronic pop of Behaviour to richly instrumented dance arrangements. The content and lyrics led to Very being called their "coming out" album, since it was during this time that Neil Tennant had publicly discussed his long rumoured homosexuality.

The album Behaviour, released in 1990, although critically well received, was commercially not as successful as their previous releases. In particular, the second single released, "Being Boring", which the duo had considered one of their strongest tracks, did not perform well on the UK charts, peaking at number 20 in November 1990. The subsequent Performance Tour which began in North America during Spring 1991 initially received mixed reviews in the United States and did not improve the poor showing of the album in the US charts, which only managed a peak of 45 on the US Billboard Album Charts. Journalist and close friend of the duo Chris Heath documented the American leg of the tour in his book Pet Shop Boys Versus America, at one point noting Chris Lowe's comment of "We should write another good dance album, write Behaviour off as a tax loss". After the Performance Tour of 1991, Pet Shop Boys elected to take a break, releasing their compilation Discography: The Complete Singles Collection that November. This initially led some to believe that the group were close to breaking up, particularly as the group were no longer perceived at the peak of their popularity after their initial "golden period" in the mid to late 1980s. When interviewed in 2006 for the documentary Pet Shop Boys: A Life In Pop, EMI representative Tony Wadsworth noted that when the record label first heard the songs on Very, "the smiles undoubtedly lit up the room [ ] the songs were so obviously commercial." The promotion of Very was to include, for the first time, music videos that made use of the CGI available at the time and thus would guarantee more airplay on channels like MTV. A limited edition of Very was also released as a double album titled Very Relentless. The second disc, Relentless, is a six track dance album containing tracks that are more experimental and instrumental. There were plans to expand upon Relentless in 1994 by releasing the six tracks along with others, making a full dance album, but this evolved into Disco 2. The six tracks on Relentless were not released elsewhere until Relentless was remastered and reissued as a standalone EP in 2023 (though "Forever in Love" is found on Very/Further Listening 1992–1994 in a remixed edited form as track 2). "Forever in Love" uses the same sample as "One Love" by The Prodigy, "Arabic Chant (Allah)" from the Zero G sample library compilation Datafile One. The album was reissued in 1996 as a mid price release, this time in a standard jewel case with a new sleeve showing an image of the original case. Very was re released on 3 July 2001 (as were most of the group's studio albums up to that point) titled Very/Further Listening 1992–1994. The reissue was digitally remastered and included a second disc featuring B sides and previously unreleased material. The unreleased songs were recorded during the Very recording sessions, but Tennant and Lowe decided not to include them on the album originally. On 9 February 2009, the album was re released yet again, still remastered, under the title Very: Remastered, but this time containing only the 12 original tracks. To date, Very is the Pet Shop Boys' most commercially successful album in the UK; it reached number one on the UK Albums Chart shortly after its release. In addition, all singles released from the album entered the top 20 of the UK Singles Chart, including "Go West", which remains one of the duo's highest charting singles. In contrast, however, the album and singles failed to achieve high chart positions on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States (with the exception of those charting on the dance charts); this was seen partly as a result of the rise of grunge and alternative rock on American radio.

The original release of Very was packaged in a unique orange jewel case with raised bumps (sometimes unofficially described as the Lego case), designed by Daniel Weil of Pentagram in London. Very Relentless was similarly unique, with the two CDs housed in card sleeves (Very in orange and Relentless in pink) with both of these housed in a translucent rubber case with raised bumps. The case for Very was featured in the 1995 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition "Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design."

Writing for NME, David Quantick deemed Very "brilliant from start to finish" and "as moving and moved as any other Pet Shop Boys album, just more obviously so", noting a shift from the "melancholy" of Behaviour towards "a sense of, gulp, happiness." Mat Snow of Q, meanwhile, wrote that Very confirms the Pet Shop Boys as "a group so tightly focused on its strengths to the exclusion of any meaningful experiment that it drives a coach and horses through the First Commandment of Pop, namely 'Thou Shalt Explore a New Direction on Every Album'." The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.