- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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The Pet Shop Boys' best album in over a decade, sitting neatly between their previous career highpoints of Very and Behaviour.
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Fundamental is the group's most inspired album in nearly a decade.
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Fundamental offers pleasure as rewarding as The Magic Mountain or Glenlivet 18--indulgences best enjoyed as you approach the half-century mark, when your imagination is keen to leisured elongations of familiar tropes or newly appreciative of exotic sumptuousness.
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'Fundamental' will not only be rated up there among the Pet Shop Boys finest albums -- it's also arguably the best electro pop record we've heard in years.
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It would be unthinkable to imagine a more pleasurable listen coming along in 2006.
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Entertainment WeeklyBalance[s] orchestral pomp with au courant club grooves. [30 Jun 2006, p.161]
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Fundamental is the thinking person's electropop album of 2006 so far.
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Focusing on New Labour's trials has reconnected the Pet Shop Boys with something of their essence.
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Q MagazineIt's like 10 years of treading water never happened. [Jun 2006, p.118]
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The majority of Fundamental is like the majority of their great album Behavior in that repeat listens are required to do these rich songs justice.
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BlenderFundamental ingeniously explores political chicanery through imaginative set pieces about private relationships. [Aug 2006, p.113]
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SpinLike Confessions on a Dance Floor, Fundamental uses squelchy electro-disco grooves that smuggle sly pop-culture commentary. [Aug 2006, p.83]
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You’re unlikely to encounter another pioneering techno-pop act entering its third decade with style and substance largely intact.
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"Fundamental" is the sound of the Pet Shop Boys reborn, and mindful of the important role they fill in the pop family.
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Trevor Horn's production has a pleasing fullness, opening the melodies without smothering them.
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Much of it seems strangely blank, neither great nor at all sub-par.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 42 out of 50
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Mixed: 6 out of 50
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Negative: 2 out of 50
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Apr 2, 2016
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Jan 6, 2016
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May 14, 2014